Staff Software Engineer, Scalable Delivery Platform

Pinterest, Inc.; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 208,000 - 365,000; Full time

Job summary

Pinterest, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to evolve the serving platforms powering Ads and Core experiences.

You will lead large-scale, low-latency distributed-system initiatives to improve performance, reliability, observability, and extensibility. You will collaborate across Ads and Core teams to define platform capabilities, modernize frameworks, and enable faster product iteration with high production confidence.

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 make sound tradeoffs across 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 the speed and quality of day-to-day engineering workflows, with rigorous testing.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent experience.
• Preferred qualifications: Experience with ads delivery, recommendation or search serving, retrieval, ranking, or experimentation systems.
• Experience with serving-framework migrations, platform consolidation, or developer tooling.
• Experience with observability, production debugging, traffic management, or incident response.

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, experimentation controls, 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 while applying sound engineering judgment and validation.
• Raise the quality bar through design reviews, code reviews, documentation, and operational excellence.
• Mentor engineers and scale technical leadership across the organization.

Skills

Java

C++

Go

Python

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Job description

Pinterest, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to evolve the serving platforms powering Ads and Core experiences.

You will lead large-scale, low-latency distributed-system initiatives to improve performance, reliability, observability, and extensibility. You will collaborate across Ads and Core teams to define platform capabilities, modernize frameworks, and enable faster product iteration with high production confidence.