Principal Engineer, Core - Pinner Journeys
Principal technical leader defining architecture and multi-year strategy for Pinterest’s Homefeed, Search, and AI Assistant experiences. The role requires 15+ years of large-scale systems or machine-learning experience, deep expertise in discovery and generative AI, and hands-on leadership across engineering and product organizations.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Define the long-term technical strategy and architecture for Homefeed, Search, and AI Assistant, including retrieval, ranking, personalization, and generative experiences.
- Drive a multi-year roadmap unifying signals, features, and models across discovery surfaces.
- Lead large-scale retrieval and ranking systems, including multi-stage retrieval, representation learning, and multi-objective optimization.
- Architect LLM and foundation-model integration with discovery systems, including query understanding, intent modeling, content understanding, orchestration, and safety guardrails.
- Set direction for experimentation, measurement, evaluation, offline metrics, online experimentation, and causal inference.
- Provide hands-on leadership through design, prototyping, design and code reviews, launch risk reduction, and mentoring senior engineers and technical leads.
- Partner with Product, Data Science, Research, and Design on product strategy and technical plans.
- Improve reliability, performance, security, privacy, cost efficiency, and operational health of large-scale ML systems.
- Represent Pinterest externally through talks, publications, partnerships, and talent development.
Requirements
- 15+ years of industry experience in large-scale systems and/or machine learning, with impact in search, recommendations, feeds, or conversational AI.
- Experience as a Principal Engineer, Architect, or equivalent senior technical leader driving cross-organizational strategy and execution.
- Deep expertise in at least two of retrieval and ranking, representation learning, search systems, and large language models/generative AI.
- Experience driving multi-year architectural transformations at scale.
- Strong product intuition and experience partnering with Product, Design, and Data Science on ambiguous product bets.
- Exceptional communication skills with executives, peers, and engineering audiences.
- Experience mentoring senior and staff engineers and building strong engineering cultures.
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, a related field, or equivalent experience.
Nice to Have
- Experience with consumer discovery products at global scale, including feeds, search, recommendations, marketplaces, or assistants.
- Experience building or integrating AI assistants or agentic workflows into consumer experiences.
Compensation and Benefits
- Base salary range: $242,634–$449,541 USD.
- Eligible for equity.
- Benefits information is available through Pinterest’s careers resources.
Skills
Machine Learning, Information Retrieval, Ranking Systems, Learning-To-Rank, Representation Learning, Embeddings, Search Systems, Query Understanding, LLMs, Generative AI, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Reinforcement Learning, Causal Inference, Online Experimentation, Personalization
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