Staff ML Engineer for Shopping Ads & AI-powered Discovery

Pinterest; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 223,000 - 390,000; Full time

Job summary

Pinterest is hiring a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to advance AI/ML systems for merchant presence and shopping experiences. You will lead end-to-end ML initiatives, partner with product and engineering teams, and shape the technical roadmap for scalable, safe AI-powered solutions.

The role focuses on agentic workflows, evaluation-driven development, and improving trust and relevance in shopping experiences across Pinterest surfaces. Based in the US, office presence is required.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of industry experience in ML engineering / applied ML / software engineering.
• Led 01 ML/LLM efforts from problem framing to production.
• Strong track record shipping ML-powered systems in domains like recommendation, ranking, or retrieval.
• Hands-on experience building LLM-powered applications in production with focus on reliability and safety.
• Deep experience with evaluation and measurement: dataset strategy, labeling, metrics, and online impact.
• Strong systems design skills balancing performance, reliability, scalability, and cost.
• Excellent communication and ability to influence technical direction across teams.
• Experience building cross-functional partnerships and collaboration.
• Bachelor's degree in CS, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent).

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end technical delivery for cross-team ML initiatives—from problem framing to rollout and iteration.
• Set technical direction with senior stakeholders, defining milestones and quality bars.
• Build and evolve ML and GenAI systems to improve merchant quality and understanding.
• Establish evaluation practices across ML + LLM systems with go/no-go criteria.
• Design systems with attention to quality, cost, latency, reliability, and safety.
• Lead ML engineering operating model: reviews, monitoring, and ownership practices.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, Data Science, Design, and Policy teams to translate needs into ML deliverables.
• Drive experimentation and iteration with A/B tests and online impact analysis.
• Mentor the team on technical design, evaluation rigor, and production readiness.
• Support hiring and onboarding to scale ML engineering capacity.

Skills

ML engineering

LLM systems

Evaluation & measurement

Systems design

Cross-functional collaboration

Communication skills

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or Engineering

Job description

Pinterest is hiring a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to advance AI/ML systems for merchant presence and shopping experiences. You will lead end-to-end ML initiatives, partner with product and engineering teams, and shape the technical roadmap for scalable, safe AI-powered solutions.

The role focuses on agentic workflows, evaluation-driven development, and improving trust and relevance in shopping experiences across Pinterest surfaces. Based in the US, office presence is required.