Sr. Technical Program Manager, Data Engineering

Pinterest; United States; On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Pinterest is seeking a Senior TPM to lead data platform modernization efforts, spanning ingestion, table formats, and workflow consolidation. You will coordinate multiple producer and consumer teams, track progress via dashboards, and drive decisions with data-driven insights.

You will partner with engineering and finance to surface risks, validate savings, and enable AI-assisted program execution using GenAI for drafting core artifacts and automating toil tasks.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of TPM experience leading complex, cross-functional technical programs.
• Strong understanding of large-scale data platforms and modernization tradeoffs.
• Proven ability to build dashboards and derive decisions from data.
• Excellent collaboration with senior engineering and business stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Lead multi-quarter data platform modernization programs (involvement with ingestion, table format migrations, workflow consolidation).
• Drive cross-team execution on migrations with many teams, manage timeline and risk.
• Build and maintain program dashboards and reporting for leadership visibility of progress and savings.
• Own reporting and tracking for a large data infrastructure portfolio, coordinate with DRIs and finance/InfraGov.
• Communicate technical tradeoffs and program status to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Prototype AI-assisted processes and dashboards to augment decisions.
• Explore AI-driven tooling to improve decision-making and automate repeatable work.

Skills

TPM experience

Cross-functional collaboration

Dashboards

Data platforms

Kafka

Flink

Iceberg

AI fluency

Problem solving

Communication

Tools

Kafka

Flink

Iceberg

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 .

The Team

Pinterest's Data Engineering organization builds and operates the data platforms that power every Pinterest product - the batch and streaming pipelines that produce training data for our ML models, the storage and table formats that back our data lake, the workflow orchestration that runs it all, and the analytics platforms that fuel experimentation and decision-making. We're in the middle of a multi-year modernization effort: moving to streaming-first ingestion (CDC, Kafka, Flink), open table formats (Iceberg), a consolidated workflow platform, and retiring legacy footprints along the way. We work closely with ML, product, and analytics teams to make Pinterest's data platforms faster, more reliable, and more cost-efficient.

What You'll Do:

• Lead a multi-quarter portfolio of data platform modernization programs - spanning ingestion (CDC/Kafka/Flink), table format migrations (Hive to Iceberg), workflow consolidation, and legacy system deprecation - partnering with engineering leads across the Data Engineering organization.
• Drive cross-team execution on migrations that involve many producer and consumer teams, managing timeline, dependency, and risk across service owners.
• Build and maintain program dashboards and reporting that give engineering and Platforms leadership a clear, current view of progress, validated savings, risk, and decisions.
• Own the reporting and tracking function for a large data infrastructure efficiency portfolio, coordinating with team-level DRIs and partner finance/InfraGov stakeholders.
• Communicate technical tradeoffs and program status clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences, from individual engineers to senior leadership.
• Use GenAI as the default operating model for EP PgM execution-producing AI-assisted first drafts of core program artifacts, modernizing high-toil workflows into AI-first mechanisms (e.g., intake triage, status synthesis, action/decision extraction, risk & dependency tracking), and synthesizing signals to proactively surface risks, decision/trade-offs, and escalation paths.
• Prototype solutions to augment decisions through data (e.g. dashboards, data analysis) or simplify processes (e.g. process and workflow helpers, or internal tools) using AI coding assistants ("vibe coding").
• Follow Pinterest AI guidance for risk, governance, and safety-by-design: appropriately handle sensitive data, validate AI-generated outputs, document assumptions/limits, and ensure AI-assisted workflows meet applicable policy/compliance expectations before broad adoption.

What We're Looking For:

• 5+ years of TPM experience leading complex, cross-functional technical programs, ideally within large-scale data platforms, streaming systems, or data infrastructure modernization efforts.
• Solid understanding of the principles behind large-scale data platforms - batch/streaming pipelines, table formats, storage layers, workflow orchestrators - and the tradeoffs involved in modernizing them.
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills, with experience building dashboards, interpreting data, and using insights to drive decisions and validate savings.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills, with a track record of partnering with senior engineering and business stakeholders in high-visibility settings.
• Comfort with ambiguity and shifting priorities across a fast-moving, multi-workstream roadmap.
• Experience with data platforms, streaming systems (Kafka, Flink), or open table formats (Iceberg) is a plus; willingness to learn and grow across domains is essential.
• Workflow design, AI fluency, data & insights orientation: experience turning repeatable program work into durable, low-toil mechanisms and improving decision-making by using GenAI (e.g., strong prompting, vibe coding lightweight scripts/tools, dashboards, data analysis and leverag)