Staff Storage Systems Engineer – AI-Driven Scale

Pinterest; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 177,000 - 365,000; Full time

Job summary

Pinterest is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the Storage Services team, defining the strategy, architecture, and operation of our online structured storage platform at scale. You will guide a high‑performing team and drive innovations across distributed SQL/graph workloads while advancing developer velocity.

You’ll lead architecture evolution, migrate workloads to TiDB, and apply AI to accelerate design, automate operations, and optimize performance for Pinterest products.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, a related field or equivalent experience.
• 8+ years of hands‑on backend software engineering experience in large‑scale distributed systems.
• Experience building and/or managing core infrastructure systems at scale, preferably in online structured data storage, distributed databases, or large‑scale data platforms.
• Hands‑on experience building and operating highly available, reliable, production‑grade systems at scale, including incident response, capacity planning, schema/architecture evolution, and performance tuning.
• Strong understanding of distributed SQL or NoSQL databases or large‑scale graph stores and query patterns.
• Experience with modern distributed storage/database technologies (TiDB or similar) is a plus.
• Demonstrated technical leadership in setting roadmap and driving execution with cross‑team alignment.
• Strong problem‑solving, data‑driven decision making.
• Experience coding in Java, Python and/or C/C++.
• Demonstrated experience leveraging AI to accelerate development, operations, and support.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical guidance and direction to a high‑performing team building reliable, performant storage systems at massive scale.
• Lead the architecture, design, and evolution of online structured storage services over large datasets.
• Drive modernization of the storage stack, including TiDB backend migrations, while improving reliability and developer velocity.
• Improve query throughput and latency across 100TB+ datasets and 1.5M+ queries per second.
• Use AI to accelerate system design, prototyping, and decision making with rigorous verification.
• Automate operational work (documentation, runbooks, reporting, QA checks) to free engineering time.
• Serve on on‑call rotation, monitor alerts, diagnose issues, and uphold operational excellence.
• Mentor senior engineers and grow the next generation of storage leaders.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

Technical leadership

AI in development

Java

Python

C/C++

Architecture roadmap

Education

Bachelor's in Computer Science or related

Tools

TiDB

SQL/NoSQL databases

Distributed storage tech

Job description

Pinterest is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the Storage Services team, defining the strategy, architecture, and operation of our online structured storage platform at scale. You will guide a high‑performing team and drive innovations across distributed SQL/graph workloads while advancing developer velocity.

You’ll lead architecture evolution, migrate workloads to TiDB, and apply AI to accelerate design, automate operations, and optimize performance for Pinterest products.