Staff ML Engineer & Technical Lead (Multimodal & GenAI)

Pinterest; United States; Hybrid; USD 189,000 - 390,000; Full time

Job summary

Pinterest is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer / Technical Lead to drive the team’s technical direction for foundational ML capabilities in visual representation learning, multimodal content understanding, and LLM-based personalization. You will lead high-impact scientific and engineering efforts across research, ML, infrastructure, and product domains.

This role requires strong ML judgment, product intuition, and exceptional cross-functional collaboration.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of industry experience including 2+ years in technical leadership
• MS or PhD in CS, ML or equivalent
• Publications at top ML/ multimodal conferences or open-source ML experience
• Hands-on experience with large-scale distributed training of generative models (LLMs, VLMs)
• Hands-on experience with distributed tooling for ML data pipelines (e.g. Spark, Hive, MapReduce)
• Experience leading ambiguous ML and research efforts in building GenAI models for content understanding, search and recommendation systems
• Excellent cross-functional communication and collaboration skills

Responsibilities

• 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

Skills

Technical leadership

Cross-functional collaboration

ML/AI expertise

Product intuition

Communication

Education

MS or PhD in CS/ML

Tools

Spark

Hive

MapReduce

Job description

Pinterest is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer / Technical Lead to drive the team’s technical direction for foundational ML capabilities in visual representation learning, multimodal content understanding, and LLM-based personalization. You will lead high-impact scientific and engineering efforts across research, ML, infrastructure, and product domains.

This role requires strong ML judgment, product intuition, and exceptional cross-functional collaboration.