Staff Technical Program Manager, Search Relevance

What you’ll do:

• Establish and own relationships with key partners across Search teams as their strategic and execution partner for delivering high impact programs.
• Define and drive Search, Relevance, and Merchant ML/AI programs based on current and emerging needs, ensuring scope, responsibilities, and ownership are well-established, risks are proactively identified and mitigated and that programs are executed and landed successfully.
• Lead the day-to-day program management of multiple work streams across the product process, including product strategy, technical design, and experimentation.
• Analyze merchant distribution and shopping experiences in partnership with Data Science; leverage these insights to lead strategy steering committees with cross-functional VPs.
• Build a subject-matter-expertise on query understanding and search engines.
• Drive product, business, and OKR requirements while also streamlining engineering efforts and cost.
• Identify gaps in shopping and search distribution strategy (i.e. signals, content, etc.) and operationalize processes to close those gaps.
• Own and scale the headcount and roadmap planning process for a large engineering org.
• Drive High-Ambiguity strategic bets: Act as the core delivery powerhouse for high-impact, fast-moving experiments. Translate ambitious executive visions into highly executable, phased project plans.
• Manage the overarching portfolio of programs within the org and mentor junior TPMs to optimize resource allocation and uplevel team performance.
• Use GenAI as the default operating model for EP PgM execution—producing AI-assisted first drafts of core program artifacts, modernizing high-toil workflows into AI-first mechanisms (e.g., intake triage, status synthesis, action/decision extraction, risk & dependency tracking), and synthesizing signals to proactively surface risks, decision/trade-offs, and escalation paths.
• Prototype solutions to augment decisions through data (e.g. dashboards, data analysis) or simplify processes (e.g. process and workflow helpers, or internal tools) using AI coding assistants (“vibe coding”).
• Follow Pinterest AI guidance for risk, governance, and safety-by-design: appropriately handle sensitive data, validate AI-generated outputs, document assumptions/limits, and ensure AI-assisted workflows meet applicable policy/compliance expectations before broad adoption.

What we’re looking for:

• BS in a technical discipline or equivalent experience (7+ years in a technical or analytical role).
• Strong technical breadth and judgment - ability to quickly ramp up and go deep on a range of technologies, ability to identify technical risks and tradeoffs.
• Comfort with a fast-changing environment and ability to manage ambiguity.
• Focus on execution and delivery in a data-informed environment.
• Excellent communication skills and ability to work cross-functionally to identify opportunities and deliver solutions.
• Exceptional relationship-building skills, organizational awareness, and ability to persuade others to accomplish program objectives while holding yourself and your team to a high standard of accountability.
• Experience working with Search products at a low level of detail highly desirable.
• AI-first execution mindset: demonstrated ability to use GenAI to accelerate planning, program operations, and stakeholder communications—starting with AI drafts and applying strong judgment to validate, refine, and drive decisions.
• Workflow design, AI fluency, data & insights orientation: experience turning repeatable program work into durable, low-toil mechanisms and improving decision-making by using GenAI (e.g., strong prompting, vibe coding lightweight scripts/tools, dashboards, data analysis and leveraging agents where appropriate).
• Safety-by-design AI fluency: experience operating within AI governance expectations (risk assessment, data handling, model/output validation, auditability/traceability) and proactively identifying where AI use is not appropriate or requires additional controls.