Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Programmatic Ads

About Pinterest:

Millions of people around the world come to our platform to find creative ideas dream about new possibilities and plan for memories that will last a lifetime. At Pinterest were on a mission to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love and that starts with the people behind the product.

Discover a career where you ignite innovation for millions transform passion into growth opportunities celebrate each others unique experiences and embrace theflexibility to do your best work. Creating a career you love Its Possible.

At Pinterest AI isnt just a feature its a powerful partner that augments our creativity and amplifies our impact and were looking for candidates who are excited to be a part of that. To get a complete picture of your experience and abilities well explore your foundational skills and how you collaborate with AI.

Through our interview process what matters most is that you can always explain your approach showing us not just what you know but how you think. You can read more about our AI interview philosophy and how we use AI in our recruiting process here.

Pinterest is building a new Programmatic Ads ML team to bring in exchange-sourced ads demand and supply. Were looking for a Staff ML engineer to develop core bidding and ranking systems that help us optimally buy and sell inventory across exchanges driving strong ROI for advertisers and growing a critical revenue stream for Pinterest.

What youll do:

• Design and implement algorithms for real-time bidding ad scoring/ranking inventory selection and yield optimization across multiple exchanges.
• Own end-to-end ML systems: problem framing metrics data/feature design model training evaluation and online experimentation.
• Introduce and productionize new exchange and supply signals (e.g. quality conversions identity fraud content understanding) to unlock incremental advertiser value.
• Partner closely with Ads Ranking & Bidding Measurement and Programmatic Engineering to integrate new models and objectives into the ads stack.
• Use AI to accelerate analysis experimentation and iteration (e.g. exploring model variants automating path from learnings to launch) while applying strong judgment and vision.

What were looking for

• Industry experience building and shipping large-scale production ML systems in ads search recommendations or related domains.
• Deep experience with control/optimization algorithms for bidding pacing allocation or similar marketplace problems.
• Strength in probabilistic modeling and measurement (e.g. quality/fraud signals deep-learning engagement prediction) and making principled trade-offs between coverage accuracy and impact.
• Proven Staff-level technical leadership as an IC: driving technical direction and cross-team alignment without formal people management.
• Demonstrated ability to use AI to improve speed and quality of your workflow with a strong track record of validating and stress-testing AI-assisted outputs.
• Degree in Computer Science Statistics or a related field.
• Experience with Cursor Copilot Codex or similar AI coding assistants for development debugging testing and refactoring.
• Familiarity with LLM-powered productivity tools for documentation search experiment analysis SQL/data exploration and engineering workflow acceleration.

Relocation Statement:

• This position is not eligible for relocation assistance. Visit ourPinFlex page to learn more about our working model.

In-Office Requirement Statement:.

• We recognize that the ideal environment for work is situational and may differ across departments. What this looks like day-to-day can vary based on the needs of each organization or role.
• This role will need to be in the office for in-person collaboration 3 times per quarter and therefore needs to be in a commutable distance from one of the following offices: San Francisco Palo Alto Seattle.

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