# Sr. Staff Engineer, Performance Ad Formats

**Company:** [Pinterest](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/pinterest)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA, Palo Alto, CA
**Role:** Backend Engineering
**Salary:** $245k – $429k/yr
**Experience:** 8+ years
**Skills:** JavaScript, React, API Design, Backend Systems, Scalable Architecture, Observability, Testing Frameworks, Data Science Collaboration, AI Tools, Experimentation Platforms
**Posted:** 2026-05-13

> Leads technical strategy and architecture for Performance Ads Formats, building scalable ad products like deal ads and dynamic experiences. Drives cross-functional initiatives, mentors engineers, and ensures production-quality systems with 8+ years experience.

## Job Description

## 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.**

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