Staff Software Engineer, Edge

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.

About the role

The Edge team owns the systems (including CDN, TLS, DNS, ingress/egress proxy fleet, and rate limiting) that connect 600M+ users to Pinterest. We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to lead our efforts to manage automation traffic (such as bots and crawlers) at the Edge, while shaping the future of our rate limiting platform.

Responsibilities

• Build Edge systems that combine in-house implementation, open-source software like Envoy proxy, and multiple CDN & DNS providers. Balance what to build, what to leverage from the community, and what to orchestrate across vendors.
• Drive automation traffic management efforts in the Edge space, designing solutions to manage bots and crawlers at scale.
• Design and implement request processing logic in Envoy to support Edge capabilities such as routing, traffic classification, and enforcement.
• Write, review, and maintain code written in C++, Golang, and Python.
• Collaborate with CDN vendors and internal platform teams to define integration points.
• Study internal user pain points with the rate limiting platform and translate findings into a prioritized roadmap.
• Mentor engineers within the team and demonstrate technical leadership through design reviews, pairing, and coaching.
• Use AI to accelerate prototyping, analysis, and operational tasks, while applying engineering judgment to verify correctness and production-readiness.
• Participate in oncall for Edge systems and drive incident response, post-mortems, and reliability improvements.

Requirements

• 6+ years of experience in infrastructure, networking, or platform engineering, with a deep focus on traffic management systems (CDN, HTTP gateways, service mesh, or load balancing).
• Experience with bot detection, scraping prevention, or automation traffic management systems is a plus.
• Proficiency in C++, Golang, or Python, with experience developing L7 HTTP proxies such as Envoy, Nginx, Varnish, and Traefik.
• Deep understanding of network protocols across L3-L7 and hands-on experience debugging production networking issues at scale.
• Experience gathering requirements from internal users, aligning cross-functional stakeholders, and delivering credible technical plans.
• Proven ability to design distributed systems architectures and drive them from proposal through proof of concept to production.
• Demonstrated experience using AI to accelerate engineering workflows (design exploration, code generation, operational analysis), with a clear approach to validating correctness and quality.
• Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.

Schedule

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.

Pay

The base salary range for this position is $177,185—$364,795 USD. 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.

Benefits

Information regarding the culture at Pinterest and benefits available for this position can be found here.