Sr. Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Content Ecosystem

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, we’re on a mission to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love, and that starts with the people behind the product.

We’re looking for candidates who are excited to be a part of that. To get a complete picture of your experience and abilities, we’ll 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.

What You’ll Do

• Set technical strategy and vision for ML systems that improve the end-to-end content ecosystem, including supply, distribution, and engagement/utility outcomes.
• Partner with DS teams to develop a content ecosystem measurement framework to quantify content health and performance (e.g., content quality, freshness, diversity, coverage, creator/content sustainability, and user value), and align it with company/business goals.
• Identify and close content gaps by building models and insights that answer: what content is missing, for whom, in which contexts, and why.
• Deeply understand what content works and why by combining causal thinking, experimentation, and model interpretability to connect content attributes and distribution mechanisms to downstream user and business outcomes.
• Build and optimize content marketplace mechanisms that balance multi-sided incentives and constraints (e.g., users, creators/publishers, advertisers, internal policy/safety), while maximizing long-term ecosystem value.
• Partner closely with cross-functional teams (Product, Data Science, UX Research, Content/Creator teams, Trust & Safety, Ads, Infra) to translate ambiguous ecosystem problems into clear technical roadmaps and deliver measurable impact.
• Mentor and grow junior ML engineers through technical coaching, design reviews, career development support, and creating a culture of strong engineering and scientific rigor.
• Raise the quality bar for ML engineering by establishing best practices for data quality, model governance, reliability, privacy-aware design, and operational excellence.
• Communicate clearly and influence broadly by producing crisp technical proposals, aligning stakeholders on tradeoffs, and driving decisions across org boundaries.
• Explore and apply advanced methods where beneficial—e.g., game-theoretic approaches, reinforcement learning, mechanism design, or bandit-style optimization—to improve marketplace dynamics and long-term ecosystem outcomes.

Qualifications

• Strong fundamentals in machine learning and optimization, with the ability to apply them to real-world, high-scale ecosystem problems.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical strategy, navigate ambiguity, and deliver end-to-end impact.
• Deep interest in marketplace dynamics (multi-sided incentives, feedback loops, long-term health metrics), and comfort with multi-objective tradeoffs.
• 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.
• (Not required but certainly a plus): background in game theory, reinforcement learning, mechanism design, or causal inference applied to ecosystems/marketplaces.

What We’re Looking For

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

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. This role will need to be in the office for in-person collaboration 1-2 times every 6 months and therefore can be situated anywhere in the country.

Our Commitment To Inclusion

Pinterest is an equal opportunity employer and makes employment decisions on the basis of merit. We want to have the best qualified people in every job. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion or religious creed, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, status as a protected veteran, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information or characteristics (or those of a family member) or any other consideration made unlawful by applicable federal, state or local laws. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements.