Staff Software Engineer: Ads & Core Serving Platform

Pinterest; Palo Alto (CA); Hybrid; USD 208,000 - 365,000; Full time

Job summary

Pinterest is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to evolve the serving platforms powering Ads and Core experiences in the Palo Alto area. You will lead large-scale, low-latency distributed systems and drive technical direction across multiple teams, collaborating with product, ML, infrastructure, and Core/Ads engineers.

Ideal candidates have 8+ years in software engineering, strong leadership, and proficiency in Java, C++, Go, or Python.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience building and operating production backend or distributed systems.
• Experience leading complex technical initiatives across teams or organizations.
• Strong expertise in distributed systems, online serving, low-latency services, or infrastructure platforms.
• Ability to balance latency, reliability, scalability, cost, and developer experience.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills with technical and cross-functional partners.
• Proficiency in Java, C++, Go, or Python.
• Experience mentoring engineers and elevating technical standards.
• Experience using AI to improve engineering workflows with rigorous testing and validation.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction and lead architecture for major serving-platform initiatives across Ads and Core.
• Build and operate scalable, highly available systems with clear performance, reliability, and efficiency goals.
• Partner with product, ML, infrastructure, and Core/Ads engineering teams to translate complex requirements into reusable platform capabilities.
• Improve the serving stack through framework modernization, API evolution, observability, and debugging tools.
• Lead complex projects end to end: technical strategy, design, implementation, rollout, adoption, and operational readiness.
• Use AI to accelerate analysis, debugging, design exploration, and iteration with rigorous validation.
• Raise the quality bar through design reviews, code reviews, documentation, and operational excellence.
• Mentor engineers and scale technical leadership across the organization.

Skills

Distributed systems

Low-latency services

Mentoring engineers

Communication skills

Java

C++

Go

Python

AI in engineering workflows

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience

Tools

Observability tooling

Production debugging tools

Job description

Pinterest is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to evolve the serving platforms powering Ads and Core experiences in the Palo Alto area. You will lead large-scale, low-latency distributed systems and drive technical direction across multiple teams, collaborating with product, ML, infrastructure, and Core/Ads engineers.

Ideal candidates have 8+ years in software engineering, strong leadership, and proficiency in Java, C++, Go, or Python.