Staff Software Engineer, Growth AI

Pinterest's Growth org reaches hundreds of millions of users by helping them discover Pinterest from across the web — through search engines, generative engines, and other emerging surfaces. We're hiring a Staff Software Engineer to be the product engineering anchor across two closely partnered teams: our SEO Product team, which owns Pinterest's durable organic discovery channels, and a new exploratory team focused on AI-first growth products.

This is a hands-on technical role for a strong product engineer who wants to architect and ship AI-powered growth experiences at scale, partnering closely with ML teams to take capabilities from prototype to production. You'll set the technical bar through your own code and architecture — not by stepping into management.

What you'll do:

• Architect and build the production systems that AI/ML capabilities ship through across two Growth teams: APIs, data pipelines, content systems, evaluation and monitoring infrastructure.
• Partner with Pinterest's centralized ML org and applied research teams to productize AI/ML capabilities at scale — defining service interfaces, building eval pipelines, and managing latency, cost, and quality tradeoffs.
• Design and build the cross-team technical foundations that serve both teams: AI evaluation systems, content quality pipelines, agent skill platform, knowledge brain.
• Set the technical bar across two teams operating an AI-native engineering model: AI in every part of the SDLC, eval-driven shipping, prototype-first culture.
• Mentor engineers across both teams as a peer Staff IC, deepening their technical work without managing them.

What we're looking for:

• 8+ years of product / systems engineering experience, with a strong track record shipping production systems at scale that touch real users.
• Cross-team technical leadership: you've been the architectural anchor on multi-team initiatives, set direction others build on, and mentored through code.
• Working knowledge of common ML/AI techniques (supervised learning, embeddings, ranking, LLMs, evaluation methodology) — enough to scope ML projects, reason about ML system design, and collaborate effectively with MLEs.
• Strong track record partnering with ML/research teams to ship AI-powered features in production.
• Demonstrated AI-augmented engineering practice — fluent use of Cursor / Claude Code / agentic tools, with a clear approach to validating AI-generated work.
• Upsell, influence the scope of the team (e.g. cross team collaboration on potential signal sharing and other opportunities )
• Bachelor’s/Master’s degree in a relevant field such as Computer Science, or equivalent experience.
• Nice to have
  • Direct hands-on experience shipping applied ML, LLM/VLM, or agentic systems in production
  • Domain experience in search, discovery, recommendations, ranking, growth, or SEO
  • Experience as the product-engineering counterpart on an AI-first product launch from prototype to scale

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 1x per quarter and therefore needs to be in a commutable distance from one of the following offices Palo Alto, San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Seattle.

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