Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Visual AI

Pinterest; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 189,000 - 390,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Job summary

Pinterest is seeking research engineers and scientists to advance visual AI capabilities. You will train large-scale vision models, develop multimodal representations, and collaborate across teams to ship production-ready features.

The role emphasizes research excellence, plus opportunities to publish and present at conferences. Applicants should have strong PyTorch experience and a PhD or equivalent work background. US-based location is supported with flexible hybrid work.

Qualifications

• Experience building and training large-scale vision models.
• Strong background in multimodal representations and visual language modeling.

Responsibilities

• Build state-of-the-art visual encoders, VLMs, and diffusion models.
• Experiment with billion-scale image datasets on GPU clusters.
• Develop visual reasoning tools for image retrieval and editing.
• Read research papers and contribute to our AI strategy discussions.
• Create data agents to assemble training data for multimodal models.
• Collaborate with product and infrastructure teams to ship capabilities.
• Publish work at conferences and maintain project blogs.
• Mentor researchers and interns in Pinterest Labs.
• Collaborate across teams in SF, Seattle, NYC, and remote roles.

Skills

Vision models

Multimodal ML

Research proficiency

Collaboration

Education

MS/PhD in ML or related

Tools

PyTorch

Large-scale training

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 theflexibility 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.

About the Team:

Hundreds of 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.

Within Pinterest, the Pinterest Labs organization focuses on applied ML research and development to power the platform. Labs works across a broad variety of AI/ML initiatives, including LLMs/VLM, agent design, core computer vision, multimodal representation learning, visual generative modeling, recommender systems, graph learning, and more. This is the group that develops the foundation AI models that fully leverage the hundreds of billions of Pins and the associated knowledge graphs, and ships new product capabilities to fully utilize these technologies.

We are currently hiring for the Visual team in Labs, which develops Pinterest's foundation visual models. In this role, you'll work with Pinterest's rich visual-text dataset to train large-scale VLMs, encoders, and diffusion models from scratch that are continuously shipped to production to power visualization and search capabilities. The team is subdivided into two pods, which share pretraining datasets, training and RL infrastructure, and generally co-develop our visual modeling ecosystem. The visual understanding pod builds the core visual embeddings and token models such as PinCLIP and deeply integrates them with the VLM/LLM/agent ecosystem at Pinterest. The visual generative pod builds Pinterest Canvas, our production image editing and generation model used across our assistant, visualization, and monetization products. Labs is staffed to be a highly collaborative environment where research scientists, ML engineers, product builders, and infrastructure engineers all work directly together, so that the team can plug into any technical effort at the company to support fast productionization.

What you'll do:

• Build state-of-the-art visual encoders, VLMs, and diffusion models that power Pinterest's visual AI capabilities
• Experiment with billion-scale image datasets, backed by large-scale GPU computing.
• Build flexible visual reasoning tools such as composed image retrieval, promptable image feature computation, instruction-tuned embedding and generative editing models, and more.
• Read research papers, participate in group discussions, and directly participate in brainstorming the company's overall AI strategy.
• Help construct data agents to build training data that can be shared across multimodal representation, composed image retrieval, image-editing generation, and visual language modeling.
• Collaborate directly with product engineers and infrastructure engineers to ship new capabilities in the core product.
• Publish and share your work through conferences like CVPR and KDD, paper submissions, and blog posts.
• Mentor junior researchers and research interns within the Pinterest Labs organization.
• Collaborate across a team situated across San Francisco, Seattle, NYC, and remote roles.

What we're looking for:

• Research engineers and scientists with experience building and training large scale vision models of all categories.
• 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 PhD in Machine Learning or related academic areas, or equivalent work experience.
• Experience using AI‑accelerated research tooling akin to auto‑research, data agents, etc.

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 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.

AI use statement:

• 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.

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.

Salary and Benefits:

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

$189,308 — $389,753 USD