Staff ML Engineer - Lead Multimodal AI & Recs (Equity)

Pinterest; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 189,000 - 390,000; Full time

Job summary

Pinterest is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer / Technical Lead to shape the team’s technical direction for foundational ML capabilities. You will build scalable content understanding systems and reusable representations, leading projects across ML research, data pipelines and productionization.

You will collaborate with cross-functional teams to translate research into product outcomes, while mentoring engineers and scientists and guiding adoption of VLMs, LLMs, and multimodal learning

Qualifications

• 7+ years of industry experience, including 2+ years in tech leadership
• MS or PhD in computer science, machine learning, or equivalent experience
• Publications at top ML/conferences or open-source ML experience
• Hands-on distributed training of generative models (LLMs, VLMs, seq models)
• Hands-on distributed tooling for ML data pipelines (Spark, Hive, MapReduce)
• Experience leading ambiguous ML/research efforts for GenAI in content understanding, search or recommendations
• Technical leadership setting roadmaps across modeling, data pipelines and productionization
• Excellent cross-functional communication and collaboration skills

Responsibilities

• Set the technical direction for foundational ML capabilities (visual representation learning, multimodal content understanding, LLM-based personalization)
• Lead high-impact scientific and technical initiatives from problem definition to production adoption
• Build reusable embeddings, representations, signals and ML infrastructure; advance VLMs, LLMs and sequence modeling
• Collaborate with Product, Data Science, Applied Science and Engineering to translate capabilities into product outcomes
• Establish rigorous modeling, data pipelines, training, inference, evaluation and operations; mentor engineers and scientists

Skills

Technical leadership

Cross-functional collaboration

ML judgment

Visual representation learning

Content understanding

Education

MS/PhD in CS/ML

Equivalent industry experience

Tools

Spark

Hive

MapReduce

LLMs

VLMs

Job description

Pinterest is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer / Technical Lead to shape the team’s technical direction for foundational ML capabilities. You will build scalable content understanding systems and reusable representations, leading projects across ML research, data pipelines and productionization.

You will collaborate with cross-functional teams to translate research into product outcomes, while mentoring engineers and scientists and guiding adoption of VLMs, LLMs, and multimodal learning