Distinguished Engineer

About the role

Pinterest is a platform where millions of people come to find creative ideas, dream about new possibilities, and plan for memories that will last a lifetime. We aim to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love, and we're seeking candidates who are passionate about transforming passion into growth opportunities and celebrating each other's unique experiences.

Responsibilities

• Define the long-term technical strategy and architecture for Homefeed, Search, and AI Assistant, including retrieval, ranking, personalization, and generative experiences.
• Drive a multi-year roadmap for unifying signals, features, and models across surfaces to deliver a coherent, high-quality discovery experience.
• Lead the design and adoption of large-scale retrieval and ranking systems (e.g., multi-stage retrieval, representation learning, multi-objective optimization) that materially improve relevance and monetization.
• Architect how Large Language Models (LLMs) and foundation models integrate with our core discovery stack (e.g., query understanding, intent modeling, content understanding, conversation orchestration, safety/guardrails).
• Set technical direction for experimentation, measurement, and evaluation frameworks, including offline metrics, online experimentation, and causal inference for discovery and generative use cases.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership on a small number of high-leverage projects: design critical components, review designs/PRs, de-risk complex launches, and mentor senior engineers and staff+TLs.
• Partner deeply with Product, Data Science, Research, and Design to frame the right problems, translate product bets into robust technical plans, and ensure we are solving for long-term platform health, not just short-term metrics.
• Raise the bar for engineering excellence: reliability, performance, security/privacy, cost efficiency, and operational health of large-scale ML systems.
• Represent Pinterest externally for these domains (e.g., talks, publications, partnerships) and help attract and grow top talent.
• Report into Pinterest’s Core Engineering leadership and work horizontally across multiple product and platform teams responsible for Homefeed, Search, and AI Assistant.
• Spend a meaningful portion of your time on hands-on technical work (design, reviews, prototyping) while also driving long-term strategy, standards, and alignment across organizations.
• Be measured on durable technical impact: system-level improvements, model and product outcomes, reduction in complexity and operational risk, and the growth of leaders and capabilities around you.

Requirements

• 15+ years of industry experience in large-scale systems and/or machine learning, with a track record of impact in search, recommendations, feeds, or conversational AI.
• Proven experience as a Distinguished Engineer, Architect, or equivalent senior technical leader driving cross-org technical strategy and execution.
• Deep expertise in at least two of the following, and strong familiarity with the others:
• Large-scale retrieval and ranking (e.g., learning-to-rank, multi-task and multi-objective optimization, bandits, RL for recommendations).
• Representation learning (e.g., embeddings, multi-modal models, dense and sparse retrieval).
• Search systems (indexing, query understanding, relevance tuning, latency/throughput optimization).
• Large language models and generative AI (prompting, fine-tuning, RAG, agents, safety/guardrails, evaluation).

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, a related field or equivalent experience.

Skills

• None specified

Benefits

• None specified

Pay

• $280,148—$576,774 USD

Schedule

• Not specified