Staff Software Engineer, TwoTwenty

About the role

Pinterest is a platform where millions of people discover creative ideas, dream about new possibilities, and plan for memorable moments. As a Staff Software Engineer in the TwoTwenty team, you will lead the technical direction of the backend systems powering Pinterest's AI-driven product experiences, including Pinterest Assistant, visual editing and content creation tools, and future LLM-based products.

Responsibilities

• Define the backend and platform architecture for AI-driven product experiences, collaborating with Engineering, Product, ML, and UX leaders to shape the technical vision and roadmap.
• Architect end-to-end systems spanning API layers, orchestration, logging, evaluation, storage, and safety controls, ensuring solutions scale across multiple products and teams.
• Lead resolution of complex technical challenges such as scaling LLM inference for real-time features, balancing latency vs. quality in AI-generated content, and standardizing backend capabilities for reuse.
• Create and implement production backend systems including API endpoints, orchestration layers, data models, caching strategies, and integrations with Pinterest's LLM infrastructure.
• Use AI to accelerate prototyping, evaluation design, and code generation, while applying judgment and verification to ensure correctness and quality.
• Create and evolve shared tooling and evaluation frameworks for LLM-based experiences, including offline eval pipelines, A/B testing hooks, quality metrics, and observability.
• Guide the design of projects with significant complexity and ambiguity spanning multiple teams, setting technical direction, reviewing critical design docs, and driving alignment across cross-functional partners.
• Raise the bar on operational excellence by improving monitoring, alerting, incident response, capacity planning, and service health, and mentor engineers to develop stronger ownership habits and grow into technical leaders.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• Minimum of 6 years of backend software engineering experience with a track record of leading and shipping projects with substantial impact on team-level or org-level goals.
• Experience operating as a technical leader for large, ambiguous, cross-functional initiatives spanning one or more teams.
• Strong Python development skills, writing idiomatic, well-structured, maintainable Python and navigating and improving large codebases.
• Experience building on top of distributed systems, designing, building, and operating services at scale, with strong judgment around caching, async processing, data storage tradeoffs, choosing existing databases, indexing, and queueing solutions.
• Experience building LLM-powered or ML-backed products in production, understanding model integration, prompt and orchestration strategies, evaluation, latency/cost tradeoffs, and operational challenges of AI-backed services.
• Demonstrated ability to use AI to improve speed and quality in your day-to-day workflow, with a clear approach to validating accuracy and quality of AI-assisted work.
• High integrity and ownership: protecting sensitive data, avoiding over-reliance on AI, and remaining accountable for final decisions and deliverables.