Sr. Staff Engineer, Performance Ad Formats

What you’ll do:

• Lead technical strategy and architecture across Performance Ads Formats, with a focus on growing good clicks, improving click quality, increasing conversions, and enhancing the Pinner experience.
• Drive cross-functional product initiatives from discovery through launch and readout, including workstreams such as post-click ad journeys, dynamic ad formats, deal ads, etc.
• Design scalable, resilient, and maintainable systems across client, API, backend, and partner surfaces, biasing for impact and balancing speed, quality, privacy / compliance needs, and long-term ownership.
• Partner with Product and Data Science to make data-driven prioritization and launch decisions, using experiment results, guardrails, and business impact to decide what to scale, iterate, or stop.
• Raise the production quality bar through strong design reviews, code reviews, testing strategy, QA / bug bash processes, observability, incident readiness, and thoughtful tech debt reduction.
• Mentor senior engineers and create technical strategy docs, design docs, code, and analysis artifacts that become examples of clarity, simplicity, and quality across multiple teams.
• Use pragmatic tools, including AI where useful, to accelerate knowledge discovery, prototyping, documentation, and quality checks while applying strong judgment and verification.

What we’re looking for:

• Deep technical architecture expertise in high-scale product systems, with the ability to reason from first principles and dig deep into how complex technical systems work under the hood.
• A track record of leading technically complex, ambiguous, multi-team initiatives that shipped measurable product or business impact.
• Excellent cross-functional collaboration and communication skills, including the ability to align senior stakeholders, make tradeoffs explicit, and influence without authority.
• Strong data-driven decision making and prioritization: you can explain why something is the right bet, what evidence supports it, and how you would know whether it worked.
• A production-quality mindset for scalable, reliable, maintainable software, including testing, observability, incident response, operational cost, and long-term system health.
• Experience mentoring Senior and Staff engineers and raising the technical bar through reviews, architecture guidance, knowledge sharing, and crisp technical writing.
• Demonstrated ability to use AI to improve speed and quality in your day-to-day workflow for relevant outputs.
• Strong track record of critical evaluation and verification of AI-assisted work (e.g., testing, source-checking, data validation, peer review).
• High integrity and ownership. You protect sensitive data, avoid over-reliance on AI, and remain accountable for final decisions and deliverables.

Nice to have: experience in ads, e-commerce, recommendations, experimentation platforms, or practical AI-assisted engineering workflows.

Bachelor’s/Master’s degree in a relevant field such as Computer Science, or 8+ YOE as a Software Engineer.