# Director of Engineering, Core & Ads Serving Platform

**Company:** [Pinterest](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/pinterest)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA, Palo Alto, CA
**Role:** Engineering Management
**Salary:** $285k – $450k/yr
**Experience:** 8+ years
**Skills:** large-scale indexing systems, search and retrieval systems, real-time architectures, incremental architectures, distributed infrastructure, Recommendation Systems, ads retrieval, System Design, architecture reviews, Technical Leadership, ai-assisted engineering
**Posted:** 2026-07-31

> Lead technical strategy and execution for Pinterest's indexing and retrieval infrastructure across Core, Ads, and Shopping. Drive modernization of real-time and incremental systems to improve freshness, quality, relevance, and cost efficiency at massive scale while mentoring senior engineers.

## Job Description

## What you’ll do

- Define and drive the long-term technical vision for indexing and retrieval infrastructure across Core, Ads, and Shopping, aligning architecture investments to measurable improvements in freshness, quality, coverage, reliability, and cost efficiency.
- Lead cross-org initiatives to modernize Pinterest’s indexing architecture, including advancing unified real-time and incremental retrieval systems that support high-scale, high-quality candidate generation.
- Partner closely with engineering, product, ML, and infrastructure leaders to align priorities, resolve tradeoffs, and deliver shared platform capabilities that improve retrieval performance across multiple discovery surfaces.
- Raise the technical bar for retrieval infrastructure by guiding system design, architecture reviews, and execution on complex platform changes that span document ingestion, indexing, retrieval, and quality evaluation.
- Build shared platform capabilities such as common metrics, tuning surfaces, and debugging workflows that help teams understand and improve the tradeoffs between relevance, safety, engagement, revenue, and infrastructure cost.
- Mentor senior engineers and technical leaders across teams, fostering strong engineering judgment, inclusive collaboration, and high standards for operational excellence.
- Use AI to accelerate analysis, prototyping, and iteration on system design options, while applying engineering judgment and verification to ensure correctness, reliability, and quality.
- Use AI to streamline repeatable work such as summarizing technical investigations, drafting design artifacts, and synthesizing platform insights so teams can move faster on high-impact decisions.

## What we’re looking for

- Deep expertise building and evolving large-scale indexing, search, recommendation, or ads retrieval systems, including real-time and incremental architectures, relevance tradeoffs, and cost-efficient distributed infrastructure.
- Strong technical leadership experience operating across multiple teams or organizations, with a track record of influencing direction, aligning stakeholders, and driving complex platform decisions to completion.
- Proven ability to lead large modernization efforts such as architectural convergence, migration from legacy systems, rollout of shared platforms, or introduction of new infrastructure capabilities at scale.
- Exceptional systems thinking and problem-solving skills, with the ability to connect platform design decisions to downstream product quality, ML needs, operational health, and business outcomes.
- Strong communication skills, including the ability to distill complex technical topics for senior technical and non-technical audiences, and to drive clarity in ambiguous, high-impact spaces.
- Demonstrated experience using AI to improve speed and quality in day-to-day engineering workflows, such as technical analysis, prototyping, design exploration, documentation, or synthesis of complex information.
- Strong track record of critically evaluating and validating AI-assisted work through testing, source-checking, peer review, and sound engineering judgment, with clear accountability for final decisions and deliverables.
- High integrity, ownership, and care in handling sensitive data and production-critical systems, including thoughtful use of AI without over-reliance and with strong attention to privacy, safety, and correctness.
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, a related technical field, or equivalent experience.

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