Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Content Visual AI

About the Position

Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Content Visual AI

San Francisco, CA, US; New York, NY, US; Seattle, WA, US; Remote, US

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. We are looking for an experienced Staff Machine Learning Engineer / Technical Lead who can drive the team’s technical direction, lead the team in building scalable content understanding systems, and make an impact on core Pinterest user and business outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical direction and multi-quarter strategy for foundational ML capabilities across visual representation learning, multimodal content understanding, and LLM-based personalization.
• Lead high-impact scientific and technical initiatives from problem definition and research strategy through experimentation, productionization, and adoption.
• Build reusable embeddings, representations, semantic signals, and ML infrastructure while advancing techniques such as VLMs, LLMs, sequence modeling, self-supervised learning, retrieval, and distillation.
• Partner with Product, Data Science, Applied Science, and Engineering to translate foundational capabilities into product outcomes and influence cross-functional roadmaps and investments.
• Establish rigorous practices for modeling, data pipelines, distributed training, inference, evaluation, experimentation, and operational excellence while mentoring engineers and scientists.

Requirements

• Minimum 7 years of industry experience, including 2+ years of tech leading teams
• MS or PhD degree in computer science, machine learning, or equivalent industry experience.
• Publications at top machine learning, multimodal and/or data mining conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, ECCV, ACL, KDD, SIGIR, etc.) or open-source ML experience
• Hands-on experience with large-scale distributed training of generative models (LLMs, VLMs, sequence models).
• Hands-on experience with distributed tooling for ML data pipelines (e.g. Spark, Hive, MapReduce)
• Hands-on experience leading ambiguous ML and research efforts in building, applying and improving GenAI models for content understanding, search and recommendation systems.
• Technical leadership and experience in setting direction for roadmaps that span modeling, data pipelines and productionization, and aligning stakeholders on priorities, trade-offs, and execution plans.
• Excellent cross-functional communication and collaboration skills

We Offer

• Competitive salary range: $189,308-$389,753 USD
• Equity eligibility
• Opportunity to work in a dynamic and innovative environment

About the Company

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.

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.