Sr. Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Closeup Relevance

Pinterest helps more than half a billion users discover new ideas to help design their lives. Our users come to Pinterest to explore ideas and run more than 6 billion search queries every month. Many of these queries represent exploratory search intent and are broad, which means that the search system should be able to deeply understand this intent, and then help people explore content, personalize results, harness visual signals effectively, and show the most engaging content up front. In addition, the team also owns query refinements and modules that help Pinners narrow their search intent from broad exploratory queries, to help them narrow their results down. All of this means that Pinterest search presents a unique challenge quite unlike other search systems and the opportunity to innovate on a product that only Pinterest can build. 

The Closeup Relevance team owns Closeup recommendations (a.k.a. related pins), which help pinners explore topics they are interested in and get continuous inspirations. This is the largest recommendation surface on Pinterest and we work with some of the largest datasets in the world, creating unique experiences for hundreds of millions of pinners. Our system serves billions of daily impressions and is critical for company business. We are looking for a highly motivated Staff ML engineer to work as a cross-team technical leader.

What you will do:

• You will be working in a cross-team environment, with a lot of talented ML engineers. You will work with state-of-the-art recommendation tech stack and have the opportunity to lead innovation and/or redesign of the full recommendation funnel.
• You will be a leader in ML innovations whose impact is felt across the organization
• Work closely with other engineering teams in Pinterest to bring superior Closeup experience to our users, such as ATG, ML Platform, Closeup Product, Content Quality and Core Infrastructure
• Develop an inspiring technical vision, and ambitious but grounded strategy for the team. Deliver outstanding results
• Provide visibility for senior leadership into the team’s global impact.
• Partner with stakeholders to expand impact across the company, including product management and data scientists. 
• Mentor and grow senior engineers on the team
• Build a culture of innovations and excellence

What we are looking for:

• 7+ years of professional experience in Machine Learning
• 5+ years of proposing and delivering innovations from original research or adopting cutting edge ML research
• 3+ years of experience in leading large-scale and mature ML recommendation systems teams, in an end-to-end fashion. 
• Bachelor’s/Master’s degree in a relevant field such as computer science, or equivalent experience.
• Thrives in ambiguity, skilled in defining and exploring open ended problems
• Experience in setting and delivering technical directions at both team and organizational level
• Expertise in machine learning modeling and infrastructure
• Adept in statistics, backend, batch and realtime processing systems
• Ability to drive the team roadmap end to end
• A knack for product and impact on users of a consumer product. 

Relocation Statement:

• This position is not eligible for relocation assistance. Visit our PinFlex page to learn more about our working model.

Relocation Statement:

• We let the type of work you do guide the collaboration style. That means we're not always working in an office, but we continue to gather for key moments of collaboration and connection.
• This role will need to be in the office for in-person collaboration 1-2 times/quarter and therefore can be situated anywhere in the country.

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