Senior Backend Architect for AI Assistant Platform

Pinterest; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 209,000 - 429,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work model

Equity

Job summary

Pinterest is seeking a Sr. Staff Backend Engineer to lead the architecture of the Pinterest Assistant backend platform.

You will drive orchestration, memory and personalization, and tool integrations at scale, partnering with Product, Design, ML, and Infrastructure teams. You’ll shape AI-powered backend systems, establish best practices for production LLMs, and mentor engineers while delivering reliable, high-quality experiences for millions of Pinners.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or equivalent experience.
• 10+ years backend software engineering powering consumer experiences.
• 3+ years operating as a technical lead driving architecture of large-scale distributed backend systems.
• Strong backend experience in Python, TypeScript, Node or similar ecosystems.
• Experience building platforms or foundational infrastructure that enables product teams to move faster.
• Strong understanding of modern model-driven systems and partnering with ML engineers on AI-powered products.
• Strong leadership, communication, and cross-functional collaboration skills.
• Product-minded and execution-oriented, with ability to lead in ambiguity.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the technical vision and architecture for Pinterest Assistant backend systems, ensuring scalability as the user base grows.
• Lead design and implementation of the core Assistant platform including orchestration, memory and personalization, context management, APIs, tool integrations, and backend infrastructure.
• Drive technical strategy by investing in foundational platform capabilities to improve developer velocity, reliability, and scalability.
• Partner with Product, Design, Frontend, ML, and Infrastructure teams to deliver a deeply personalized multimodal conversational experience.
• Shape architecture for AI-powered applications including retrieval, context assembly, tool execution, memory and model orchestration with ML teams.
• Establish engineering best practices for production LLM and agent systems, including observability, logging, evals, safety, rollout strategies, incident response.
• Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar through architecture reviews and guidance.
• Navigate ambiguity and make pragmatic architectural decisions balancing rapid iteration with maintainability.
• Influence Pinterest’s AI platform strategy across teams and drive scalable, high-quality experiences.
• Stay current with advances in LLMs, agent systems, and backend design, applying them to product development.

Skills

Backend engineering

Python

TypeScript/Node.js

Distributed systems

Leadership

Collaboration

ML integration

Product-minded

Education

Bachelor’s degree in computer science or equivalent

Job description

Pinterest is seeking a Sr. Staff Backend Engineer to lead the architecture of the Pinterest Assistant backend platform.

You will drive orchestration, memory and personalization, and tool integrations at scale, partnering with Product, Design, ML, and Infrastructure teams. You’ll shape AI-powered backend systems, establish best practices for production LLMs, and mentor engineers while delivering reliable, high-quality experiences for millions of Pinners.