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.
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.
At Pinterest, AI isn't just a feature, it's a powerful partner that augments our creativity and amplifies our impact, and 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. You can read more about our AI interview philosophy and how we use AI in our recruiting process here.
About the Role
We’re looking for a Senior Manager, Engineering (M17) to lead a critical function at the intersection of AI foundations, proactive experiences, and assistant product experiences at Pinterest. This leader will be responsible for building and scaling the teams, technical direction, and execution needed to power the next generation of AI-driven experiences across Pinterest.
This role is central to how Pinterest evolves toward more personalized, proactive, and assistive experiences for Pinners. You will lead teams working across foundation models, AI infrastructure, personalization, agentic systems, orchestration, and user-facing AI capabilities, helping define how Pinterest better understands user intent, anticipates needs, and delivers more useful, contextual, and inspiring experiences.
You will operate as a cross-functional and cross-organizational engineering leader: setting vision, building strong teams and managers, driving execution across ambiguous product and platform bets, and partnering closely with Product, Design, Research, Data Science, and executive leadership to deliver durable impact on user experience, engagement, and long-term platform capability.
What you’ll do:
- Define and drive the organizational and technical strategy for AI Foundations and Proactive Experiences, spanning areas such as, LLM-powered systems, agentic workflows, orchestration, and agentic user experiences.
- Build and lead a high-performing engineering organization composed of senior engineers, tech leads, creating clarity, velocity, and strong execution across multiple workstreams.
- Partner with Product, Design, Research, and Data Science to shape the roadmap for proactive and assistive Pinterest experiences, translating ambitious product bets into scalable technical investments and execution plans.
- Lead the development of foundational AI capabilities that enable context-aware, personalized, and anticipatory experiences, including model integration, user understanding, orchestration, safety, and evaluation frameworks.
- Drive execution on a multi-year roadmap for building reusable AI capabilities that can power experiences across surfaces and use cases, improving consistency, quality, and leverage across Pinterest’s product ecosystem.
- Raise the bar on engineering excellence across the org, including system reliability, experimentation rigor, privacy, security, operational health, and cost efficiency.
- Establish strong operating mechanisms for technical direction and delivery, including planning, design reviews, roadmap management, goal setting, and cross-team dependency management.
- Hire, retain, and grow exceptional talent, while building a healthy and ambitious engineering culture grounded in accountability, inclusion, craftsmanship, and user impact.
- Coach managers and senior ICs to increase their scope and effectiveness, and build the leadership bench needed to scale the organization over time.
- Partner with senior engineering and company leadership to align investments, resolve tradeoffs, and ensure the organization is focused on the highest-leverage opportunities for Pinterest’s AI future.
- You will report into Pinterest Engineering leadership and lead a strategically important organization working across AI foundations and proactive user experiences.
- You will split your time across organizational leadership, technical direction, talent development, and cross-functional execution, ensuring both strong near-term delivery and long-term capability building.
- You will work closely with partner teams across product and platform engineering to create leverage, reduce fragmentation, and accelerate Pinterest’s AI roadmap.
- You will be measured on team health and effectiveness, technical and product outcomes, organizational scale, leadership development, and durable platform impact.
What we’re looking for:
- Significant experience leading engineering teams in AI/ML, personalization, intelligent product experiences, platform engineering, or consumer-facing AI systems at scale.
- Proven success as a senior engineering leader, with experience managing managers and senior technical leaders across complex, cross-functional problem spaces.
- Strong track record of driving strategy and execution for large-scale, technically complex organizations, especially in areas involving AI systems, platform capabilities, personalization, or generative AI.
- Experience building or leading teams working on one or more of the following:
- Foundation model integration and LLM-powered systems
- Personalization and user understanding
- Agentic systems and orchestration
- Proactive or assistive product experiences
- Generative AI infrastructure, tooling, or evaluation
- Demonstrated ability to lead through ambiguity and convert early-stage opportunities into clear roadmaps, team structures, and measurable outcomes.
- Strong product and business judgment, with the ability to balance long-term platform investments against near-term user and company impact.
- Excellent partnership skills and a history of working effectively with PM, Design, Data Science, Research, and peer engineering leaders.
- Strong technical depth and credibility; able to engage deeply on architecture, platform design, model tradeoffs, and execution risks without needing to be the primary hands-on builder.
- Passion for building strong teams and developing leaders, with a track record of creating inclusive, high-performing engineering cultures.
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- Nice to have:
- Experience in consumer products at global scale, especially in personalization, creator tools, assistants, content understanding, or intelligent recommendation experiences.
- Experience leading teams building AI assistants, proactive recommendation systems, agentic workflows, or LLM-powered consumer experiences.
- Experience scaling organizations through periods of change and transitions, such as adopting foundation models, modernizing AI infrastructure, or building shared AI capabilities across multiple product areas.
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. What this looks like day-to-day can vary based on the needs of each organization or role.
- This role will need to be in the office for in-person collaboration [1-2 times/month], and therefore can be situated in Seattle.
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.
Information regarding the culture at Pinterest and benefits available for this position can be found here.
Our Commitment to Inclusion:
Pinterest Seattle, Washington, USA Office
1730 Minor Ave, Seattle, Washington, United States, 98101
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