Staff Software Engineer — AI Backend & Platform Lead

San Francisco (CA)

Hybrid

USD 177,000 - 365,000

Full time

3 days ago

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Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Job summary

Pinterest is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the backend direction for AI-driven product experiences such as Pinterest Assistant and LLM-based tools. You will design scalable backend systems, drive technical roadmaps, and mentor teams across surfaces and groups.

You will work on API layers, orchestration, data models, and safety controls while shaping platform strategy for fast, reliable AI-powered experiences. This role blends hands-on coding with architecture leadership.

Qualifications

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field or equivalent experience.
Minimum 6 years of backend software engineering with impact on teams or org.
Experience leading cross-functional initiatives spanning multiple teams.
Strong Python development skills with large codebases.
Experience building at scale on distributed systems with caching and queues.
Experience building LLM-powered or ML-backed products in production.
Demonstrated ability to apply AI to improve speed and quality of workflows.
High integrity and ownership; protect data and ensure accountability.

Responsibilities

Define the backend and platform architecture for AI-driven product experiences.
Architect end-to-end systems across API, orchestration, logging, storage and safety.
Lead resolution of complex challenges like LLM inference and latency vs. quality.
Design and implement production backend systems with endpoints and data models.
Use AI to accelerate prototyping, evaluation design and code generation.
Create and evolve tooling and evaluation frameworks for LLM-based experiences.
Guide design of complex projects spanning multiple teams and drive alignment.
Improve monitoring, alerting, incident response, and capacity planning; mentor engineers.