Principal AI Engineer — Discovery & Ranking

Socket.dev; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 243,000 - 450,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Job summary

Pinterest is seeking a Principal Engineer to set technical vision across Homefeed, Search, and AI Assistant, shaping how hundreds of millions of Pinners discover and interact with inspiration daily. You will lead architecture, mentor engineers, and partner with product, data science, and design to balance innovation with platform health.

Role emphasizes hands-on design and reviews while guiding long-term strategy, standards, and cross-team alignment in a fast-evolving AI-enabled product

Qualifications

• 15+ years of industry experience in large-scale systems or ML with impact in search, recommendations, feeds, or conversational AI.
• Proven experience as Principal Engineer or equivalent senior technical leader driving cross-org strategy.
• Strong cross-functional collaboration with PM/Design/Data Science and executives.

Responsibilities

• Define long-term technical strategy and architecture for Homefeed, Search, and AI Assistant.
• Lead multi-year roadmaps to unify signals, features, and models across surfaces.
• Design and adopt large-scale retrieval and ranking systems to improve relevance and monetization.
• Architect integration of LLMs and foundation models with the discovery stack (query understanding, content understanding, orchestration).
• Set measurement and evaluation frameworks including offline metrics and online experiments.

Skills

Large-scale systems

ML/AI systems

Leadership

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS

Tools

LLMs & GenAI

Job description

Pinterest is seeking a Principal Engineer to set technical vision across Homefeed, Search, and AI Assistant, shaping how hundreds of millions of Pinners discover and interact with inspiration daily. You will lead architecture, mentor engineers, and partner with product, data science, and design to balance innovation with platform health.

Role emphasizes hands-on design and reviews while guiding long-term strategy, standards, and cross-team alignment in a fast-evolving AI-enabled product