Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Content Visual AI

Pinterest; Seattle (WA); Hybrid; USD 189,000 - 390,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Job summary

Pinterest is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer / Technical Lead to drive the technical direction for foundational ML capabilities in visual representation learning, multimodal content understanding, and LLM-based personalization. You will lead cross-functional teams across research, ML, and engineering to deliver scalable content understanding solutions.

You will guide ambitious research, productionization, and adoption efforts, mentoring engineers and scientists while shaping roadmaps

Qualifications

• 7+ years of industry experience, including 2+ years of tech leading teams.
• MS or PhD in computer science, machine learning, or equivalent experience.
• Publications at top ML conferences or open-source ML experience.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical direction for foundational ML capabilities across visual representation learning and multimodal content understanding.
• Lead high-impact scientific and technical initiatives from problem definition through productionization.
• Build reusable embeddings and ML infrastructure while advancing VLMs, LLMs, and sequence modeling techniques.
• Partner with Product, Data Science, Applied Science, and Engineering to translate capabilities into product outcomes.
• Establish rigorous practices for modeling, data pipelines, distributed training, inference and evaluation.

Skills

Distributed training

Distributed tooling

Leadership

Publications

LLMs & VLMs

Cross-functional collaboration

Education

MS or PhD in CS/ML

Tools

Spark

Hive

MapReduce

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 and 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 User and Content Foundations org is responsible for deeply understanding our content, users and their interactions by generating high-quality, reusable signals and insights that power relevance and personalization across the platform. We work at the intersection of distributed machine learning, large multimodal models, data infrastructure, and product adoption to build foundational capabilities that support our partners, including Discovery, Search, Growth, and Ads. We are looking for an experienced Staff Machine Learning Engineer / Technical Lead who can drive the team's technical direction, lead the team in building scalable content understanding systems, and make an impact on core Pinterest user and business outcomes. In this role, you will lead ambiguous, high-impact scientific and engineering efforts that create reusable representations, models, and signals. You'll work across research, machine learning, infrastructure, and engineering domains to turn advances in VLMs, LLMs, multimodal learning and sequence modeling into impact. This role is ideal for a deeply technical leader who combines strong ML judgment with product intuition. Expertise in visual representation learning and content understanding is especially valuable; experience with user understanding, recommender systems and LLMs is also highly relevant.

What will you be doing:

• Set the technical direction and multi-quarter strategy for foundational ML capabilities across visual representation learning, multimodal content understanding, and LLM-based personalization.
• Lead high-impact scientific and technical initiatives from problem definition and research strategy through experimentation, productionization, and adoption.
• Build reusable embeddings, representations, semantic signals, and ML infrastructure while advancing techniques such as VLMs, LLMs, sequence modeling, self-supervised learning, retrieval, and distillation.
• Partner with Product, Data Science, Applied Science, and Engineering to translate foundational capabilities into product outcomes and influence cross-functional roadmaps and investments.
• Establish rigorous practices for modeling, data pipelines, distributed training, inference, evaluation, experimentation, and operational excellence while mentoring engineers and scientists.

What we're looking for:

• Minimum 7 years of industry experience, including 2+ years of tech leading teams
• MS or PhD degree in computer science, machine learning, or equivalent industry experience.
• Publications at top machine learning, multimodal and/or data mining conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, ECCV, ACL, KDD, SIGIR, etc.) or open-source ML experience
• Hands-on experience with large-scale distributed training of generative models (LLMs, VLMs, sequence models).
• Hands-on experience with distributed tooling for ML data pipelines (e.g. Spark, Hive, MapReduce)
• Hands-on experience leading ambiguous ML and research efforts in building, applying and improving GenAI models for content understanding, search and recommendation systems.
• Technical leadership and experience in setting direction for roadmaps that span modeling, data pipelines and productionization, and aligning stakeholders on priorities, trade-offs, and execution plans.
• Excellent cross-functional communication and collaboration skills

Relocation Statement:

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

In-Office Requirement Statement:

• We recognize that the ideal environment for work is situational and may differ across departments. What this looks like day-to-day can vary based on the needs of each organization or role.
• This role will need to be in the office for in-person collaboration 1-2 times/quarter and can be situated anywhere in the USA.

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

$189,308 — $389,753 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. If you require a medical or religious accommodation during the job application process, please completethis form for support.

By submitting this application, I certify that all information submitted in my application and throughout the hiring process is true, accurate, and complete to the best of my knowledge. I understand that any false statement, omission, or misrepresentation may disqualify me from employment consideration or result in termination if discovered after hire.