Staff Data Scientist, Ads Product

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. Our Merchants organization focuses on onboarding and activation, catalog quality and health, merchant presence (including creator/UGC and trust signals), and ads upsell—helping merchants build healthy catalogs, reach the right audiences, and unlock clear paths to growth. In this role, you’ll lead high-impact engineering at the intersection of commerce platforms, catalog systems, and AI-native experiences. This includes applying ML, AI-assisted workflows, and GenAI where appropriate to improve metadata quality, merchant tooling, and operational efficiency. You’ll partner closely with Engineering Managers, Product Managers, Data Scientists, and other senior engineers to deliver systems with measurable business and user impact. What you’ll do:  * Own end-to-end technical delivery for cross-team initiatives—from problem framing and technical strategy through architecture, implementation, rollout, and iteration. * Shape catalog and integration systems for scale, reliability, and quality, ensuring merchant data is deep, broad, fresh, and actionable across partners, formats, and key signals such as inventory and pricing where relevant. * Build and evolve ML-, GenAI-, and AI-assisted merchant experiences with strong validation and guardrails—for example, metadata enrichment, gap-filling, and internal tools that improve catalog health without compromising trust. * Contribute to merchant onboarding and activation systems that span teams, creating streamlined flows, signals, and decisioning pathways that improve approval rates, merchant quality, and time to value. * Partner where appropriate on organic attribution, merchant insights, and data-driven pathways from organic success to paid products, ensuring strategy is measurable rather than anecdotal. * Drive technical decisions using clear tradeoffs across revenue, conversion, catalog health, engagement, and Torso success. * Mentor senior engineers and raise the bar for technical design, engineering quality, and production readiness across the organization. * Use AI to accelerate your own work—across exploration, drafting, analysis, and synthesis—while maintaining strong judgment, rigorous validation, and accountability for outcomes. What we’re looking for: * 10+ years of software engineering experience, including meaningful time as a Staff, Senior Staff, or equivalent-level IC building and operating complex production systems. * Strong track record in commerce, marketplaces, ads, or other adjacent large-scale domains, including leadership on cross-team technical initiatives. * Deep experience in systems design, API design, and data-intensive systems, with the ability to navigate tradeoffs in performance, reliability, and scalability. * Experience building or partnering on ML-, AI-, or GenAI-adjacent systems, with a pragmatic understanding of where these technologies add value and how to deploy them responsibly. * Catalog, integrations, or merchant platform experience is a strong plus. * Experience with growth, measurement, funnel optimization, or organic-to-paid ecosystems is a plus. * Strong communication skills and the ability to influence technical direction without directly owning every implementation detail. * Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field—or equivalent practical 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 1-2 times/month, and therefore needs to be in a commutable distance from one of the following offices: San Francisco or Palo Alto. #LI-HYBRID #LI-CL5 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 $245,402—$429,454 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. We are looking for a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to lead the technical vision for our Ads Conversion Core Modeling team, building the state-of-the-art systems that power our global marketplace.   What you’ll do:  * Lead the technical direction and development of state-of-the-art applied ML projects for ads conversion.   * Design and build large-scale DNN models to improve user action prediction with low latency.   * Mine text, visual, and user signals to better understand intention and infer interests from online activity.   * Use AI to accelerate analysis and iteration, while applying judgment and verification to ensure correctness and quality.   * Automate repeatable tasks such as documentation, reporting, and QA checks to speed up the development lifecycle.   * Coach and mentor engineers while collaborating with product and sales to design new ad products.   What we’re looking for: * Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Statistics, or a related field. * 6+ years of industry experience building production ML systems at scale (Search, Recommendations, or Ranking).   * 2+ years of experience leading technical projects or teams.   * Demonstrated ability to use AI to improve speed and quality in your day-to-day workflow for relevant outputs.   * 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. * High integrity and ownership: you protect sensitive data, avoid over-reliance on AI, and remain accountable for final deliverables. * Strong mathematical foundation and experience with statistical methods and A/B testing.    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 1-2 times per month and therefore needs to be in a commutable distance from one of the following offices: San Francisco, Palo Alto, Seattle. #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 $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.