Sr. Machine Learning Engineer, Applied Science

Pinterest; California (MO); Hybrid; USD 161,000 - 332,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Quarterly office meetups

Job summary

Pinterest Labs is hiring for the Canvas team to advance large-scale text-to-image generative models using rich visual-text data. You will prototype diffusion architectures, read papers, and collaborate across research and engineering to ship production-ready capabilities.

Ideal candidates have 5+ years in computer vision, a MS or PhD in ML/CS, and fluency with AI coding tools. You’ll mentor interns and contribute to publications while working in a flexible, national hybrid setup.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of industry computer vision experience.
• MS or PhD in Machine Learning, Computer Science, or related areas.
• Experience with diffusion models and generative CV
• Publications in top ML conferences bonus

Responsibilities

• Prototype new diffusion model architectures for Pinterest Canvas.
• Read research papers and discuss ideas with the team.
• Collect and curate visual training data for Canvas, including RLHF tasks.
• Publish and share work via conferences, papers, blogs, etc.
• Mentor junior researchers or interns within Pinterest Labs.

Skills

Generative computer vision

Diffusion models

Research experience

Prototyping models

Mentoring

Education

MS or PhD in ML/CS

Tools

Cursor

Copilot

Codex

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, 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.

Within Pinterest, the Pinterest Labs organization focuses on applied ML research and development. Labs focuses on a broad variety of AI/ML initiatives, such as core computer vision, multimodal representation learning, heterogeneous graph neural networks, generative modeling, recommender systems, etc. This is the group that develops foundation ML models that fully leverage the tens of billions of Pins and the associated knowledge graph to improve the core product.

We are currently hiring for the visual modeling team in Labs, which focuses on developing Pinterest Canvas. Canvas is a foundation text-to-image model developed internally for helping various visualization, inpainting, and outpainting products. In this role, you’ll get to work with Pinterest’s rich visual-text dataset to build large-scale generative models which are continuously being shipped to production to power visualization features. The core Canvas pod is a small group (~6 engineers along with a product prototyping team) inside of Labs, allowing for deep collaboration. For example, engineers working on the Canvas project also participate in the development of our core multimodal text & image embeddings, as these are in turn used to condition the model in unique ways.

What you’ll do:

• Prototype new model architectures for Pinterest Canvas, our internal text-to-image generative model. We’re looking for hands‑on experience working with diffusion text-to-image models and independent model implementation skills.

• Read research papers, participate in group discussions, and help brainstorm our overall visual generative strategy at the company.

• Help with collection of relevant visual training data for Pinterest Canvas, particularly to conduct RLHF, targeted fine‑tuning, etc.

• Publish and publicize your work via conferences, paper submissions, blog posts, etc.

• Mentor more junior researchers or research interns within the Pinterest Labs organization.

What we’re looking for:

• Research engineers and scientists who have experience working with generative computer vision models, preferably various forms of diffusion models.

• 5+ years of industry computer vision experience.

• M.S. or PhD in Machine Learning, Computer Science, or related areas.

Nice to Have:

• Publications at top ML conferences.

• Experience using Cursor, Copilot, Codex, or similar AI coding assistants for development, debugging, testing, and refactoring.

• Familiarity with LLM‑powered productivity tools for documentation search, experiment analysis, SQL/data exploration, and engineering workflow acceleration.

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 therefore can be situated anywhere in the country.

Relocation Statement:

• This position is not eligible for relocation assistance. Visit our PinFlex page to learn more about our working model.

#LI-REMOTE #LI-AK7

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.

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

US based applicants only

$161,263—$332,012 USD

Our Commitment to Inclusion:

Pinterest is an equal opportunity employer and makes employment decisions on the basis of merit. We want to have the best qualified people in every job. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion or religious creed, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, status as a protected veteran, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information or characteristics (or those of a family member) or any other consideration made unlawful by applicable federal, state or local laws. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements.