Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Ads Conversion Core Modeling

Pinterest

About Pinterest: Millions of people around the world come to our platform to find creative ideas, dream about new possibilities and plan for memories that will last a lifetime. At Pinterest, we’re on a mission to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love, and that starts with the people behind the product. Discover a career where you ignite innovation for millions, transform passion into growth opportunities, celebrate each other’s unique experiences and embrace the flexibility to do your best work. Creating a career you love? It’s Possible. At Pinterest, AI isn't just a feature, it's a powerful partner that augments our creativity and amplifies our impact, and we’re looking for candidates who are excited to be a part of that. To get a complete picture of your experience and abilities, we’ll explore your foundational skills and how you collaborate with AI. Through our interview process, what matters most is that you can always explain your approach, showing us not just what you know, but how you think. You can read more about our AI interview philosophy and how we use AI in our recruiting process here. Pinterest is building a new Programmatic Ads ML team to bring in exchange-sourced ads demand and supply. We’re looking for a Staff ML engineer to develop core bidding and ranking systems that help us optimally buy and sell inventory across exchanges, driving strong ROI for advertisers and growing a critical revenue stream for Pinterest.   What you’ll do: * Design and implement algorithms for real-time bidding, ad scoring/ranking, inventory selection, and yield optimization across multiple exchanges. * Own end-to-end ML systems: problem framing, metrics, data/feature design, model training, evaluation, and online experimentation. * Introduce and productionize new exchange and supply signals (e.g., quality, conversions, identity, fraud, content understanding) to unlock incremental advertiser value. * Partner closely with Ads Ranking & Bidding, Measurement, and Programmatic Engineering to integrate new models and objectives into the ads stack. * Use AI to accelerate analysis, experimentation, and iteration (e.g., exploring model variants, automating path from learnings to launch) while applying strong judgment and vision.   What we’re looking for * Industry experience building and shipping large-scale production ML systems in ads, search, recommendations, or related domains. * Deep experience with control/optimization algorithms for bidding, pacing, allocation, or similar marketplace problems. * Strength in probabilistic modeling and measurement (e.g., quality/fraud signals, deep-learning engagement prediction) and making principled trade-offs between coverage, accuracy, and impact. * Proven Staff-level technical leadership as an IC: driving technical direction and cross-team alignment without formal people management. * Demonstrated ability to use AI to improve speed and quality of your workflow, with a strong track record of validating and stress-testing AI-assisted outputs. * Degree in Computer Science, Statistics, or a related field. * Experience with Cursor, Copilot, Codex, or similar AI coding assistants for development, debugging, testing, and refactoring. * Familiarity with LLM-powered productivity tools for documentation search, experiment analysis, SQL/data exploration, and engineering workflow acceleration.   Relocation Statement: * This position is not eligible for relocation assistance. Visit our PinFlex page to learn more about our working model.   In-Office Requirement Statement:. * We recognize that the ideal environment for work is situational and may differ across departments. What this looks like day-to-day can vary based on the needs of each organization or role. * This role will need to be in the office for in-person collaboration 3 times per quarter and therefore needs to be in a commutable distance from one of the following offices: San Francisco, Palo Alto, Seattle. #LI-SM4 At Pinterest we believe the workplace should be equitable, inclusive, and inspiring for every employee. In an effort to provide greater transparency, we are sharing the base salary range for this position. The position is also eligible for equity. Final salary is based on a number of factors including location, travel, relevant prior experience, or particular skills and expertise. Information regarding the culture at Pinterest and benefits available for this position can be found here. US based applicants only $222,716—$389,753 USD Our Commitment to Inclusion: Pinterest is an equal opportunity employer and makes employment decisions on the basis of merit. We want to have the best qualified people in every job. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion or religious creed, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, status as a protected veteran, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information or characteristics (or those of a family member) or any other consideration made unlawful by applicable federal, state or local laws. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you require a medical or religious accommodation during the job application process, please complete this form for support.   By submitting this application, I certify that all information submitted in my application and throughout the hiring process is true, accurate, and complete to the best of my knowledge. I understand that any false statement, omission, or misrepresentation may disqualify me from employment consideration or result in termination if discovered after hire.

Pinterest

About Pinterest: Millions of people around the world come to our platform to find creative ideas, dream about new possibilities and plan for memories that will last a lifetime. At Pinterest, we’re on a mission to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love, and that starts with the people behind the product. Discover a career where you ignite innovation for millions, transform passion into growth opportunities, celebrate each other’s unique experiences and embrace the flexibility to do your best work. Creating a career you love? It’s Possible. At Pinterest, AI isn't just a feature, it's a powerful partner that augments our creativity and amplifies our impact, and we’re looking for candidates who are excited to be a part of that. To get a complete picture of your experience and abilities, we’ll explore your foundational skills and how you collaborate with AI. Through our interview process, what matters most is that you can always explain your approach, showing us not just what you know, but how you think. You can read more about our AI interview philosophy and how we use AI in our recruiting process here. The Advertiser and Seller Experience team builds intelligent systems that help Pinterest advertisers and sellers move from insight to action. Our work spans advertiser-facing products such as Ads Manager as well as internal seller productivity tools that help sales teams identify opportunities, prepare customer conversations, troubleshoot campaign performance, and drive advertiser growth. As a Staff Machine Learning Engineer focused on Agentic AI & Recommendations, you will lead the ML strategy and execution for the intelligence layer behind these experiences. You will build recommendation systems, context foundations, and feedback loops that help AI agents understand advertiser and seller goals, surface the right next-best action, and learn from user response over time. This is a high-impact Staff IC role for someone who wants to combine deep recommendation systems expertise with modern agentic AI to shape how Pinterest advertisers and sellers work.   What you’ll do:  * Lead the design and implementation of large-scale recommendation and decisioning systems that power proactive advertiser and seller guidance across Ads Manager, Pinterest Business Assistant, Pinnacle, and sales productivity workflows. * Build ML foundations for a unified context layer and context agent that transforms campaign, account, performance, market, workflow, and interaction data into reusable signals for agentic experiences. * Own recommendation initiatives end-to-end, from problem framing, label and feedback design, feature pipelines, model development, and offline evaluation through production deployment, experimentation, and monitoring. * Develop evaluation and feedback loops that measure recommendation quality, user trust, action rates, business impact, and failure modes, then use those learnings to continuously improve models and agent behavior. * Apply modern ML techniques such as retrieval and ranking, embeddings, personalization, multi-objective optimization, contextual decisioning, and response modeling to business-critical advertiser and seller workflows. * Use AI to accelerate analysis, prototyping, documentation, and experimentation while applying strong judgment, testing, data validation, and review to ensure correctness, reliability, privacy, and customer trust. * Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar for ML development, experimentation rigor, responsible AI usage, and production-quality agentic systems across the organization. What we’re looking for: * 7+ years of experience building and deploying large-scale ML systems in production (e.g., ads ranking, recommendation, Agentic AI, or search), with strong end-to-end ownership from problem scoping through evaluation and experimentation, and solid software engineering skills in at least one modern language (e.g., Python, Java) and large-scale data systems. * Degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, or a related technical field, or equivalent experience. * Strong end-to-end ML ownership, including problem scoping, data and label design, feature engineering, model training, production deployment, offline/online evaluation, experimentation, and monitoring. * Deep understanding of recommendation system architectures such as candidate generation, retrieval, ranking, re-ranking, embeddings, vector search, multi-task learning, calibration, contextual bandits, or reinforcement learning. * Proven Staff-level technical leadership as a hands-on IC, setting technical direction and driving multi-quarter ML and systems roadmaps, including aligning stakeholders on priorities, trade-offs, and execution plans. * Excellent cross-functional communication and collaboration skills, building strong partnerships with product, data science, infra, and partner ML teams to clarify ambiguous problem spaces, co-create solutions, and drive consensus with senior stakeholders. * Experience using AI coding assistants (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code) and LLM-powered productivity tools to accelerate development, experimentation, and data exploration, with a clear approach to validation, data protection, and critical review of AI-assisted work. * Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, a related field or equivalent experience. Relocation Statement: * This position is not eligible for relocation assistance. Visit our PinFlex page to learn more about our working model. In-Office Requirement Statement: *  We recognize that the ideal environment for work is situational and may differ across departments. What this looks like day-to-day can vary based on the needs of each organization or role. * This role will need to be in the office for in-person collaboration 1 day per week and therefore needs to be in a commutable distance from one of the following offices [Seattle or Bay Area]. #LI-REMOTE #LI-DM57 At Pinterest we believe the workplace should be equitable, inclusive, and inspiring for every employee. In an effort to provide greater transparency, we are sharing the base salary range for this position. The position is also eligible for equity. Final salary is based on a number of factors including location, travel, relevant prior experience, or particular skills and expertise. Information regarding the culture at Pinterest and benefits available for this position can be found here. US based applicants only $189,308—$389,753 USD Our Commitment to Inclusion: Pinterest is an equal opportunity employer and makes employment decisions on the basis of merit. We want to have the best qualified people in every job. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion or religious creed, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, status as a protected veteran, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information or characteristics (or those of a family member) or any other consideration made unlawful by applicable federal, state or local laws. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you require a medical or religious accommodation during the job application process, please complete this form for support.   By submitting this application, I certify that all information submitted in my application and throughout the hiring process is true, accurate, and complete to the best of my knowledge. I understand that any false statement, omission, or misrepresentation may disqualify me from employment consideration or result in termination if discovered after hire.

Pinterest

About Pinterest: Millions of people around the world come to our platform to find creative ideas, dream about new possibilities and plan for memories that will last a lifetime. At Pinterest, we’re on a mission to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love, and that starts with the people behind the product. Discover a career where you ignite innovation for millions, transform passion into growth opportunities, celebrate each other’s unique experiences and embrace the flexibility to do your best work. Creating a career you love? It’s Possible. At Pinterest, AI isn't just a feature, it's a powerful partner that augments our creativity and amplifies our impact, and we’re looking for candidates who are excited to be a part of that. To get a complete picture of your experience and abilities, we’ll explore your foundational skills and how you collaborate with AI. Through our interview process, what matters most is that you can always explain your approach, showing us not just what you know, but how you think. You can read more about our AI interview philosophy and how we use AI in our recruiting process here. Within the Ads Delivery team, we try to connect the dots between the aspirations of pinners and the products offered by our partners. In this role, you will be responsible for developing and executing a vision for the evolution of the Pinterest marketplace. You will design and implement systems that improve the ads delivery funnel, experiments that shape the utility function, auction mechanism design, ad allocation and for deriving new insights through analysis of the marketplace dynamics. In short, this is a unique position, where you’ll get the freedom to work to bring together pinners and partners in this unique marketplace. What you’ll do: * Build and improve backend systems and statistical models that underlay the marketplace to maximize value for Pinners, Partners and Pinterest. * Define and implement experiments to understand long term Marketplace effects. * Develop strategies to balance long and short term business objectives. * Drive multi-functional collaboration with peers and partners across the company to improve knowledge of marketplace design and operations. What we’re looking for: * MS or PhD degree in Computer Science, Statistics, related field, or equivalent experience. * 7+ years of industry experience. * Strong software engineering and mathematical skills with knowledge of statistical methods. * Hands-on experience with large-scale online e-commerce systems is a plus. * Background in computational advertising is preferred, but not required.   In-Office Requirement Statement: * We let the type of work you do guide the collaboration style. That means we're not always working in an office, but we continue to gather for key moments of collaboration and connection. * This role will need to be in the office for in-person collaboration 1 time/month, and therefore needs to be in a commutable distance from one of the following offices: San Francisco, Palo Alto, Seattle.   Relocation Statement: * This position is not eligible for relocation assistance. Visit our PinFlex page to learn more about our working model.   #LI-HYBRID #LI-SM4 At Pinterest we believe the workplace should be equitable, inclusive, and inspiring for every employee. In an effort to provide greater transparency, we are sharing the base salary range for this position. The position is also eligible for equity. Final salary is based on a number of factors including location, travel, relevant prior experience, or particular skills and expertise. Information regarding the culture at Pinterest and benefits available for this position can be found here. US based applicants only $227,871—$469,147 USD Our Commitment to Inclusion: Pinterest is an equal opportunity employer and makes employment decisions on the basis of merit. We want to have the best qualified people in every job. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion or religious creed, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, status as a protected veteran, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information or characteristics (or those of a family member) or any other consideration made unlawful by applicable federal, state or local laws. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you require a medical or religious accommodation during the job application process, please complete this form for support.   By submitting this application, I certify that all information submitted in my application and throughout the hiring process is true, accurate, and complete to the best of my knowledge. I understand that any false statement, omission, or misrepresentation may disqualify me from employment consideration or result in termination if discovered after hire.