Staff Machine Learning Engineer

Pinterest is hiring a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to lead Growth Content Science and build complex modeling and ML systems that power notification content ranking on a real-time production stack.

Responsibilities

• Lead multiple technical sub-areas within Growth Content Science.
• Advance Growth ML model improvements using an A/B test driven innovation loop, from ideation through production launches.
• Own the health of the ML ecosystem, including training pipelines, feature and serving infrastructure, evaluation frameworks, monitoring, and A/B test setup.
• Raise the technical excellence bar through mentorship, reviews, evaluations, documentation, and standard setting.
• Collaborate with colleagues and stakeholders to tackle large, cross-functional initiatives.
• Partner with other engineering leaders to define technical direction and roadmaps.
• Work autonomously in complex, evolving environments while driving execution effectively.
• Identify and apply relevant state-of-the-art techniques from recent research, or collaborate on novel research directions.
• Continuously optimize work by building and using cutting-edge AI tools.

Requirements

• Graduate degree in Computer Science or related field.
• Minimum 8 years of machine learning engineering experience, including hands-on work building and shipping models for a large-scale, real-time, end-user production recommender system.
• Expertise in recommender modeling, including sequence modeling of user behavior with transformer architectures, DNN rankers, and generative and LLM-native recommenders.
• Experience building and operating high-QPS, latency-constrained ML systems, including training and serving infrastructure, and owning cost, latency, and reliability tradeoffs.
• Industry-grade software engineering experience, with a track record of thorough code and design reviews that improve team quality.
• Understanding content personalization and content quality as a combined problem, including why cold-start and low-signal users can break standard rankers.
• Experience leading technical work across teams, making timely decisions on hard tradeoffs, and declining changes when user experience or system health is at stake.
• Experience mentoring junior engineers.
• Outstanding written and verbal communication skills, especially in cross-functional settings.
• Demonstrated experience applying AI to improve speed and quality in applied research.
• Strong track record of publications and patents.

Location and Work Model

• San Francisco, CA (onsite)
• In-office requirement: in-person collaboration 1-2 times/quarter; role can be situated anywhere in the country based on departmental needs and role requirements.

Relocation

• This position is not eligible for relocation assistance.

Inclusion Commitment

• Pinterest is an equal opportunity employer and makes employment decisions on the basis of merit.
• All qualified applicants are considered without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion or religious creed, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, status as a protected veteran, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information or characteristics, or any other consideration made unlawful.
• Pinterest also considers qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements.
• If you require a medical or religious accommodation during the job application process, complete the accommodation form for support.

Salary Range: USD 189,308 - 389,753 per year