Staff Machine Learning Engineer

About the role

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. Discover a career where you ignite innovation for millions, transform passion into growth opportunities, celebrate each other’s unique experiences and embrace the flexibility to do your best work. Creating a career you love? It’s Possible.

What You’ll Do

• Lead the design and implementation of large-scale recommendation and decisioning systems that power proactive advertiser and seller guidance across Ads Manager, Pinterest Business Assistant, Pinnacle, and sales productivity workflows.
• Build ML foundations for a unified context layer and context agent that transforms campaign, account, performance, market, workflow, and interaction data into reusable signals for agentic experiences.
• Own recommendation initiatives end-to-end, from problem framing, label and feedback design, feature pipelines, model development, and offline evaluation through production deployment, experimentation, and monitoring.
• Develop evaluation and feedback loops that measure recommendation quality, user trust, action rates, business impact, and failure modes, then use those learnings to continuously improve models and agent behavior.
• Apply modern ML techniques such as retrieval and ranking, embeddings, personalization, multi-objective optimization, contextual decisioning, and response modeling to business-critical advertiser and seller workflows.
• Use AI to accelerate analysis, prototyping, documentation, and experimentation while applying strong judgment, testing, data validation, and review to ensure correctness, reliability, privacy, and customer trust.
• Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar for ML development, experimentation rigor, responsible AI usage, and production-quality agentic systems across the organization.

What We’re Looking For

• 7+ years of experience building and deploying large-scale ML systems in production (e.g., ads ranking, recommendation, Agentic AI, or search), with strong end-to-end ownership from problem scoping through evaluation and experimentation, and solid software engineering skills in at least one modern language (e.g., Python, Java) and large-scale data systems.
• Strong end-to-end ML ownership, including problem scoping, data and label design, feature engineering, model training, production deployment, offline/online evaluation, experimentation, and monitoring.
• Deep understanding of recommendation system architectures such as candidate generation, retrieval, ranking, re-ranking, embeddings, vector search, multi-task learning, calibration, contextual bandits, or reinforcement learning.
• Proven Staff-level technical leadership as a hands-on IC, setting technical direction and driving multi-quarter ML and systems roadmaps, including aligning stakeholders on priorities, trade-offs, and execution plans.
• Excellent cross-functional communication and collaboration skills, building strong partnerships with product, data science, infra, and partner ML teams to clarify ambiguous problem spaces, co-create solutions, and drive consensus with senior stakeholders.
• Experience using AI coding assistants (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code) and LLM-powered productivity tools to accelerate development, experimentation, and data exploration, with a clear approach to validation, data protection, and critical review of AI-assisted work.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, a related field or equivalent experience.
• Relocation Statement: This position is not eligible for relocation assistance.
• In-Office Requirement Statement: This role will need to be in the office for in-person collaboration 1 day per week and therefore needs to be in a commutable distance from one of the following offices [Seattle or Bay Area].

Benefits

At Pinterest, we believe the workplace should be equitable, inclusive, and inspiring for every employee. In an effort to provide greater transparency, we are sharing the base salary range for this position. The position is also eligible for equity. Final salary is based on a number of factors including location, travel, relevant prior experience, or particular skills and expertise.

Pay

$189,308—$389,753 USD

Schedule

Not specified

Equal Opportunity Employer

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.