Manager II, Machine Learning Engineering-Content Foundation

Engg; United States; Hybrid; USD 223,000 - 390,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Job summary

Pinterest is seeking an experienced Engineering Manager for the Content Foundation ML Team in the USA. You will lead a team of engineers and applied scientists to build foundational content understanding signals, scalable infrastructure, and model-powered capabilities that power Discovery, Search, Growth, and Ads.

This role requires setting a long-term technical vision for semantic signal generation and collaborating with product, data science, and partner ML teams to deliver impact at scale,

Qualifications

• 7+ years of industry experience, including 2+ years in management.
• Masters degree in computer science, computer engineering, or equivalent work experience.
• Publication at top machine learning and data mining conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, KDD, SIGIR).
• Experience with large-scale distributed training and inference of LLM and VLM models.
• Proven technical leadership across ML and Data systems, with multi-quarter roadmaps.

Responsibilities

• Lead and mentor engineers and applied scientists in developing foundational content understanding signals, infrastructure and systems.
• Provide long-term technical vision for semantic signal generation and scalable model-powered infrastructure.
• Partner with product, data science, and downstream engineering teams to ensure signals drive impact.
• Manage project execution, roadmap planning, risk mitigation, and stakeholder communication.
• Address challenges in leveraging VLM/LLM technologies and building reusable foundations.

Skills

Management experience

ML leadership

Distributed systems

Cross-functional collaboration

Communication skills

Education

Master's degree

Publications in ML conferences

Tools

Hadoop

Spark

GenAI platforms

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 and 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 . Pinterest helps Pinners discover and do what they love.

Content Foundation ML Team

Responsible for understanding the semantic meaning of Pinterest content and generating high-quality, reusable signals and insights that power relevance and personalization across the platform. We work at the intersection of machine learning, large multimodal models, data infrastructure, and product adoption to build foundational content understanding capabilities that support Discovery, Search, Growth, and Ads. We are looking for an experienced Engineering Manager who can drive the team’s technical direction, lead the team in building scalable content understanding systems, and make an impact on core Pinterest user and business outcomes.

What will you be doing:

• Lead, mentor and grow a team of engineers and applied scientists in developing foundational content understanding signals, infrastructure and systems that are integral to key Pinterest products across Discovery, Search, Growth, and Ads.
• Provide thought leadership in content understanding and machine learning by setting a long-term technical vision for semantic signal generation, reusable foundational layers, and scalable model-powered infrastructure.
• Partner closely with product, data science, and downstream engineering teams to ensure these signals drive meaningful impact across Pinterest.
• Manage project execution and stakeholder communication, including roadmap planning, technical decision-making, risk mitigation and progress updates to achieve business goals.
• Help the team solve difficult technical challenges such as:
  • How to leverage the latest VLM and LLM technologies to understand the full semantic richness of Pinterest content and generate high-quality signals with strong precision, recall and coverage across multiple locales?
  • How to build reusable foundational layers such as captions, summaries and semantic descriptors that can power multiple downstream use cases efficiently and at low infra cost?
  • How to improve inference throughput, freshness and serving efficiency so that content understanding signals can keep up with millions of new Pins and evolving content every day?
  • How to measure and improve the downstream impact of content understanding signals on relevance, personalization, engagement and ads performance across different surfaces?
  • How to build robust monitoring, evaluation and debugging systems that ensure signal quality, accessibility, latency and freshness at scale?

What we’re looking for:

• 7+ years of industry experience, including 2+ years of management experience.
• Masters degree in computer science, computer engineering, or equivalent work experience.
• Publication at top machine learning and data mining conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, KDD, SIGIR).
• Experience with:
  • Large scale distributed training and inference of LLM and VLM models.
  • Distributed tooling for ML data pipelines, e.g. Hadoop, Spark.
  • Leading ambiguous ML projects to build, apply and improve GenAI models for content understanding and recommendation systems.
  • Proven technical leadership across both ML and Data systems, with experience setting direction for multi-quarter roadmaps that span modeling, data pipelines, and productionization, and aligning stakeholders on priorities, trade-offs, and execution plans.
  • Excellent cross-functional communication and collaboration skills, building strong partnerships with product, data science, and partner ML teams to clarify ambiguous problem spaces, co-create solutions, and drive consensus with senior stakeholders.

Relocation Statement:

This position is not eligible for relocation assistance.

In-Office Requirement Statement:

We let the type of work you do guide the collaboration style. That means we’re not always working in an office, but we continue to gather for key moments of collaboration and connection. This role will need to be in the office for in-person collaboration 1-2 times/quarter and can be situated anywhere in the USA.

Our Commitment to Inclusion:

At Pinterest we believe the workplace should be equitable, inclusive, and inspiring for every employee.

In an effort to provide greater transparency, we are sharing the base salary range for this position.

• The position is also eligible for equity.

Final salary is based on a number of factors including location, travel, relevant prior experience, or particular skills and expertise.

US based applicants only $222,716 - $389,753 USD

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

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, an