Principal Engineer, Indexing & Retrieval Infrastructure

Pinterest; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 285,000 - 450,000; Full time

Job summary

Pinterest is seeking a Principal Engineer to define and lead the long-term vision for indexing and retrieval infrastructure across Core, Ads, and Shopping. You will partner with engineering, product, ML, and infra leaders to deliver scalable, high-quality candidate generation for discovery surfaces.

You will mentor senior engineers, drive modernization efforts, and apply AI to accelerate analysis, prototyping, and design synthesis while ensuring reliability and cost efficiency.

Qualifications

• Experience building large-scale indexing or retrieval systems with real-time and incremental architectures.
• Proven ability to lead multiple teams or orgs and drive platform decisions to completion.
• Strong communication skills to distill complex topics for technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience using AI to speed up analyses, prototyping, and documentation.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the long-term technical vision for indexing and retrieval infrastructure across Core, Ads, and Shopping.
• Lead cross-org initiatives to modernize Pinterest’s indexing architecture with unified real-time and incremental retrieval systems.
• Collaborate with engineering, product, ML, and infra leaders to improve retrieval performance across discovery surfaces.
• Guide system design and architecture reviews for complex platform changes spanning ingestion, indexing, retrieval, and quality evaluation.
• Create shared platform capabilities like metrics, tuning surfaces, and debugging workflows to balance relevance, safety, engagement, and cost.

Skills

Large-scale indexing

Technical leadership

Cross-organizations

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or related field

Job description

Pinterest is seeking a Principal Engineer to define and lead the long-term vision for indexing and retrieval infrastructure across Core, Ads, and Shopping. You will partner with engineering, product, ML, and infra leaders to deliver scalable, high-quality candidate generation for discovery surfaces.

You will mentor senior engineers, drive modernization efforts, and apply AI to accelerate analysis, prototyping, and design synthesis while ensuring reliability and cost efficiency.