Director of ML Engineering, Ads Quality & Impact

Pinterest; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 315,000 - 551,000; Full time

Job summary

Pinterest is seeking a Director of Machine Learning Engineering to lead a broad Ads Quality modeling portfolio, including engagement, conversion, ROAS optimization, ranking, and ML-powered experimentation.

You will shape a unified technical strategy across Ads Quality and guide multiple modeling teams to deliver scalable, reliable ML systems at scale in a hybrid on-site role based near San Francisco.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of experience building and deploying ML systems with people leadership.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical vision and multi-year strategy for Ads Quality ML.
• Lead and develop engineering managers, senior technical leaders, and machine-learning engineers across multiple modeling domains.
• Establish a coherent modeling roadmap across engagement, conversion, ROAS, relevance, ranking, and foundation-model initiatives.
• Drive improvements in model quality, calibration, generalization, cold-start performance, attribution, and robustness across Pinterest surfaces.
• Guide the evolution of Ads models toward larger, more generalizable architectures, including foundation models, distillation, long-context sequence modeling, multimodal representations, and cross-domain learning.
• Ensure that modeling investments translate into reliable production outcomes through strong offline evaluation, online experimentation, launch discipline, and post-launch monitoring.
• Partner closely with Ads Product, Ads Data Science, Ads Signals, Ads Retrieval, Ads Delivery, Measurement, Core, ATG, and ML Infrastructure.
• Set expectations for training-serving parity, data quality, privacy, reliability, latency, capacity, and cost efficiency.
• Improve engineering velocity through better experimentation workflows, reusable modeling infrastructure, automation, and agentic development tools.
• Build a culture of technical excellence, candid collaboration, inclusion, ownership, and continuous learning.
• Represent Ads Quality ML in senior leadership forums and communicate strategy, tradeoffs, risks, and results clearly to technical and non-technical audiences.

Skills

Leadership of ML orgs

Large-scale ML teams

Recommender systems

Deep learning

Foundation models

Online experimentation

Communication

Strategic planning

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering or related

Advanced degree preferred

Job description

Pinterest is seeking a Director of Machine Learning Engineering to lead a broad Ads Quality modeling portfolio, including engagement, conversion, ROAS optimization, ranking, and ML-powered experimentation.

You will shape a unified technical strategy across Ads Quality and guide multiple modeling teams to deliver scalable, reliable ML systems at scale in a hybrid on-site role based near San Francisco.