Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Shopping Merchants

Pinterest; Toronto; Hybrid; CAD 213,000 - 314,000; Full time

Job summary

Pinterest is hiring a Staff Machine Learning Engineer for the Merchant team in the Toronto vicinity. You will lead LLM-first initiatives, build robust ML/GenAI systems, and drive measurements that improve merchant quality and shopping experiences on Pinterest.

You will partner with Product, Engineering, Data Science, and Design, shaping technical roadmaps, ensuring production readiness, and mentoring teammates. This role is hybrid with in-office collaboration required in Toronto.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of industry experience in ML engineering / software engineering with staff-level experience.
• Demonstrated ability to lead 0→1 ML/LLM efforts and deliver production systems with measurable impact.
• Strong track record shipping ML-powered systems in domains like recommendation, ranking, retrieval, or commerce.
• Hands-on experience building LLM-powered applications in production with awareness of reliability and safety.
• Deep experience with evaluation and measurement: dataset strategy, labeling, metrics design, regression testing.
• Strong systems design skills for data- and ML-intensive systems, balancing performance, reliability, and cost.
• Excellent communication to influence technical direction across teams without owning every implementation.
• Experience building cross-functional partnerships; teamwork is essential.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end technical delivery for cross-team ML initiatives, from framing to rollout and monitoring.
• Define milestones and quality bars for the ML domain in collaboration with leadership.
• Build and evolve ML/GenAI systems that improve merchant quality and understanding, affecting retrieval and ranking.
• Establish evaluation practices, datasets, and go/no-go criteria for quality, safety, and performance.
• Design systems with attention to cost, latency, reliability, and observability for production readiness.
• Define and scale the ML engineering operating model, launch readiness, and monitoring.
• Collaborate with Product, Engineering, Data Science, Design, Trust/Policy, and ML platforms teams on goals.
• Lead experimentation, error analysis, and translate learnings into measurable improvements.
• Mentor teammates, raise engineering standards, and contribute to hiring and onboarding.
• Scale the domain by supporting hiring and onboarding as the team grows.

Skills

ML engineering leadership

Production ML systems

LLM/GenAI

Evaluation & metrics

Cross-functional collaboration

System design

Communication skills

Mentoring & hiring support

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field

Job description

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.

We’re hiring a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to help drive the future of merchant presence and shopping experiences on Pinterest.

This role sits on the Merchant team and focuses on building AI/ML systems (including LLMs) that identify, understand, and surface relevant, high-quality merchants across segments—so Pinners can discover new brands with greater confidence and consideration, and merchants can reach new, diverse audiences.

In this role, you’ll lead LLM-first, evaluation-driven initiatives—near-term focused on agentic workflows, measurement, and operational rigor that strengthen Merchant Integrity and Business Integrity. Longer term, you’ll help advance core relevance capabilities such as merchant/brand affinity modeling and related signals that improve shopping discovery across Pinterest. You’ll partner closely with Product Managers, Engineering Managers, Data Science, Design, and platform teams to take systems from early prototypes to reliable, scaled production.

You will also serve as the technical lead for ML in this space—reporting to a Director and acting as the first ML Engineering hire in this org—helping define the technical roadmap, establish engineering standards, and lay the foundation for scaling the domain and team over time. This is a high-agency, high-impact role with direct levers on user trust, relevance, and shopping outcomes across high-traffic Pinterest surfaces (organic and paid).

What you’ll do

• Own end-to-end technical delivery for cross-team initiatives—from problem framing and technical strategy through architecture, implementation, rollout, monitoring, and iteration.
• Set technical direction and execution plans in partnership with a Director and cross-functional leads, including defining milestones, sequencing, and quality bars for the domain.
• Build and evolve ML and GenAI systems that improve merchant quality and understanding (e.g., merchant content enrichment, attribute extraction/normalization, entity resolution, merchant/brand quality signals, and policy-aware transformations), with clear downstream impact on retrieval, ranking, and shopping surfaces.
• Establish robust evaluation and measurement practices across ML + LLM-assisted systems, including golden datasets, human-in-the-loop review loops, automated regression testing, offline/online metric alignment, and clear go/no-go launch criteria for quality, safety, and performance.
• Design systems with strong attention to quality, cost, latency, reliability, and safety, including guardrails, fallbacks, caching, and observability to support scaled production operations.
• Establish the ML engineering operating model for the org (where applicable): evaluation standards, launch readiness reviews, monitoring/alerting, and sustainable ownership practices to keep quality high as the roadmap scales.
• Partner with cross-functional stakeholders across Product, Engineering, Data Science, Design, Trust/Policy/Legal, and ML platform teams to align on goals, constraints, and rollout plans—and to turn ambiguous needs into concrete ML deliverables.
• Drive experimentation and iteration (A/B tests, holdouts), lead error analysis, and translate learnings into measurable improvements to user trust and shopping outcomes.
• Mentor and raise the bar for technical design, evaluation rigor, and production readiness across the team—enabling faster, safer iteration with AI/ML tooling and best practices.
• Help scale the domain by supporting hiring and onboarding over time (e.g., interview loops, onboarding plans, technical mentorship), as we build out ML engineering capacity.

What we’re looking for

• 8+ years of industry experience in ML engineering / applied ML / software engineering, including meaningful time operating as a Staff-level (or equivalent) IC delivering complex production systems.
• Demonstrated ability to lead 0→1 ML/LLM efforts: taking ambiguous problem spaces, defining the approach, and delivering a production system with measurable impact.
• Strong track record shipping ML-powered systems in domains such as recommendation, ranking, retrieval, content understanding, ads relevance, commerce, or adjacent areas with clear product impact.
• Hands-on experience building LLM-powered applications in production (or adjacent GenAI systems), with strong judgment on reliability, failure modes, rollout safety, and practical tradeoffs.
• Deep experience with evaluation and measurement: dataset strategy, labeling/review operations, metric design, regression testing, and connecting offline improvements to online outcomes.
• Strong systems design skills building data- and ML-intensive systems, with the ability to navigate tradeoffs in performance, reliability, scalability, and cost.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to influence technical direction across teams without directly owning every implementation detail.
• Demonstrated experience building and enhancing cross-functional partnerships with other teams and organizations.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field— or equivalent practical experience.

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

This role will need to be in the office for in-person collaboration 1 time per week and therefore needs to be in a commutable distance from one of the following offices: Toronto Office.

#LI-AK7 #LI-HYBRID

Canada based applicants only

$213,180—$314,160 CAD

Information regarding the culture at Pinterest and benefits available for this position can be found here.

Our Commitment to Inclusion

Pinterest is an equal opportunity employer and makes employment decisions on the basis of merit. We want to have the best qualified people in every job. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment 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 those of a family member) or any other consideration made unlawful by applicable federal, state or local laws. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you require a medical or religious accommodation during the job application process, please complete this form for support.

By submitting this application, I certify that all information submitted in my application and throughout the hiring process is true, accurate, and complete to the best of my knowledge. I understand that any false statement, omission, or misrepresentation may disqualify me from employment consideration or result in termination if discovered after hire.