Staff Software Engineer, Growth AI

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.

Pinterests Growth org reaches hundreds of millions of users by helping them discover Pinterest from across the web through search engines generative engines and other emerging surfaces. Were hiring a Staff Software Engineer to be the product engineering anchor across two closely partnered teams: our SEO Product team which owns Pinterests durable organic discovery channels and a new exploratory team focused on AI-first growth products.

This is a hands-on technical role for a strong product engineer who wants to architect and ship AI-powered growth experiences at scale partnering closely with ML teams to take capabilities from prototype to production. Youll set the technical bar through your own code and architecture not by stepping into management.

What youll do:

• Architect and build the production systems that AI/ML capabilities ship through across two Growth teams: APIs data pipelines content systems evaluation and monitoring infrastructure.
• Partner with Pinterests centralized ML org and applied research teams to productize AI/ML capabilities at scale defining service interfaces building eval pipelines and managing latency cost and quality tradeoffs.
• Design and build the cross-team technical foundations that serve both teams: AI evaluation systems content quality pipelines agent skill platform knowledge brain.
• Set the technical bar across two teams operating an AI-native engineering model: AI in every part of the SDLC eval-driven shipping prototype-first culture.
• Mentor engineers across both teams as a peer Staff IC deepening their technical work without managing them.

What were looking for:

• 8 years of product / systems engineering experience with a strong track record shipping production systems at scale that touch real users.
• Cross-team technical leadership: youve been the architectural anchor on multi-team initiatives set direction others build on and mentored through code.
• Working knowledge of common ML/AI techniques (supervised learning embeddings ranking LLMs evaluation methodology) enough to scope ML projects reason about ML system design and collaborate effectively with MLEs.
• Strong track record partnering with ML/research teams to ship AI-powered features in production.
• Demonstrated AI-augmented engineering practice fluent use of Cursor / Claude Code / agentic tools with a clear approach to validating AI-generated work.
• Upsell influence the scope of the team (e.g. cross team collaboration on potential signal sharing and other opportunities )
• Bachelors/Masters degree in a relevant field such as Computer Science or equivalent experience.
• Nice to have
  • Direct hands-on experience shipping applied ML LLM/VLM or agentic systems in production
  • Domain experience in search discovery recommendations ranking growth or SEO
  • Experience as the product-engineering counterpart on an AI-first product launch from prototype to scale

Relocation Statement:

• This position is not eligible for relocation assistance. Visit our PinFlex 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 1x per quarter and therefore needs to be in a commutable distance from one of the following offices Palo Alto San Francisco Los Angeles or Seattle.

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