Staff Machine Learning Engineer

Staff Machine Learning Engineer

Company: Pinterest Location: USA (Seattle or Bay Area) Contract: Permanent Industry: Tech

About Pinterest

Millions of people worldwide use Pinterest to discover creative ideas, explore possibilities, and plan for memorable experiences. Our mission is to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love, and this starts with our talented team. At Pinterest, AI is a powerful partner that enhances creativity and amplifies impact. We are seeking individuals excited to contribute to this vision, demonstrating strong foundational skills and the ability to collaborate effectively with AI.

About the Role

The Advertiser and Seller Experience team at Pinterest builds intelligent systems to empower advertisers and sellers. This role focuses on leading the Machine Learning strategy and execution for the intelligence layer behind these experiences, specifically in Agentic AI and Recommendations. You will be instrumental in building recommendation systems, context foundations, and feedback loops that enable AI agents to understand user goals, suggest optimal actions, and learn over time. This is a high-impact Staff Individual Contributor role for those who wish to combine deep expertise in recommendation systems with modern agentic AI to shape how Pinterest's advertisers and sellers operate.

What You'll Do

• Lead the design and implementation of large-scale recommendation and decisioning systems for proactive advertiser and seller guidance across various Pinterest products.
• Build ML foundations for a unified context layer and context agent to transform diverse data into reusable signals for agentic experiences.
• Own recommendation initiatives end-to-end, from problem framing and data design to model development, production deployment, and ongoing monitoring.
• Develop and refine evaluation and feedback loops to measure recommendation quality, user trust, business impact, and identify areas for improvement.
• Apply modern ML techniques such as retrieval and ranking, embeddings, personalization, multi-objective optimization, contextual decisioning, and response modeling.
• Utilize AI to accelerate development processes, including analysis, prototyping, documentation, and experimentation, while ensuring correctness, reliability, privacy, and trust.
• Mentor engineers and elevate the technical standards for ML development, experimentation rigor, responsible AI usage, and production-quality agentic systems.

What We're Looking For

• 7+ years of experience building and deploying large-scale ML systems in production (e.g., ads ranking, recommendation, Agentic AI, search).
• Strong end-to-end ownership of ML systems, from problem scoping through evaluation and experimentation.
• Solid software engineering skills in at least one modern language (e.g., Python, Java) and experience with large-scale data systems.
• A degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Deep understanding of recommendation system architectures (candidate generation, retrieval, ranking, embeddings, vector search, etc.).
• Proven Staff-level technical leadership, with experience setting technical direction and driving multi-quarter roadmaps.
• Excellent cross-functional communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to build strong partnerships and drive consensus.
• Experience using AI coding assistants and LLM-powered productivity tools, with a clear approach to validation and critical review.

Working Model & Location

• This role requires in-office collaboration 1 day per week and necessitates being within commuting distance of our Seattle or Bay Area offices.
• This position is not eligible for relocation assistance. Please visit our PinFlex page to learn more about our working model.

Compensation & Benefits

• Base Salary Range: $189,308—$389,753 USD
• This position is also eligible for equity.
• Information regarding the culture at Pinterest and available benefits can be found here.

Our Commitment to Inclusion

Pinterest is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity and inclusion. We encourage applications from all qualified individuals. If you require accommodation during the application process, please complete this form.