Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Computer Vision

Jobtailor; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 220,000; Full time

Job summary

Pinterest is hiring a senior research-focused ML engineer to advance visual representations and language modeling. The role centers on prototyping state-of-the-art visual encoders and training on billion-scale datasets using large-scale GPU resources.

You will develop tools for image retrieval, segmentation, and embedding generation, while contributing to Pinterest's visual strategy. You will read papers, discuss in groups, publish work, and mentor junior researchers within Pinterest Labs,

Qualifications

• Experience building and training computer vision models.
• Experience with multimodal representations and visual language modeling is strongly preferred.
• A track record of research contributions and/or shipping ML models to production.
• Hands-on experience with large-scale model training and modern deep learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch).
• Strong collaboration skills and a demonstrated ability to work effectively in a small, fast-moving team.
• MS or Ph.D. in Machine Learning or related academic areas, or equivalent work experience.
• Publications at top ML conferences.
• Experience using Cursor, Copilot, Codex, or similar AI coding assistants for development, debugging, testing, and refactoring.

Responsibilities

• Prototype state-of-the-art visual encoders that power Pinterest's recommender systems and internal visual language models.
• Experiment with billion-scale datasets and gain hands-on experience with large-scale GPU computing.
• Build flexible visual reasoning tools such as composed image retrieval, promptable detection/segmentation, and instruction-tuned embedding and generative models.
• Read research papers, participate in group discussions, and help brainstorm the company's overall visual generative strategy.
• Help collect relevant visual instruction training data that can be shared across multimodal representation, composed image retrieval, text-to-image generation and visual language modeling.
• Publish and share your work through conferences, paper submissions, and blog posts.
• Mentor junior researchers and research interns within the Pinterest Labs organization.

Skills

Computer vision

Multimodal learning

Research publications

Collaboration

Open-source contributions

Deep learning

Education

MS/PhD in ML or related field

Tools

PyTorch

Cursor

Copilot/Codex

Job description

Responsibilities

• Prototype state-of-the-art visual encoders that power Pinterest's recommender systems and internal visual language models.
• Experiment with billion‑scale datasets and gain hands‑on experience with large-scale GPU computing.
• Build flexible visual reasoning tools such as composed image retrieval, promptable detection/segmentation, and instruction‑tuned embedding and generative models.
• Read research papers, participate in group discussions, and help brainstorm the company's overall visual generative strategy.
• Help collect relevant visual instruction training data that can be shared across multimodal representation, composed image retrieval, text-to-image generation and visual language modeling.
• Publish and share your work through conferences, paper submissions, and blog posts.
• Mentor junior researchers and research interns within the Pinterest Labs organization.

Requirements

• Experience building and training computer vision models.
• Experience with multimodal representations and visual language modeling is strongly preferred.
• A track record of research contributions (e.g., publications, open-source work) and/or shipping ML models to production.
• Hands‑on experience with large-scale model training and modern deep learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch).
• Strong collaboration skills and a demonstrated ability to work effectively in a small, fast‑moving team.
• M.S. or Ph.D. in Machine Learning or related academic areas, or equivalent work experience.
• Publications at top ML conferences.
• Experience using Cursor, Copilot, Codex, or similar AI coding assistants for development, debugging, testing, and refactoring.

Core Competencies

Demonstrates expertise in building and training computer vision models, with a strong focus on multimodal representations and visual language modeling. Proven ability to collaborate effectively in fast‑paced environments and contribute to research through publications and mentorship.