Sr. Staff Software Engineer, Pinterest Assistant

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the technical vision and architecture for backend systems powering Pinterest Assistant at scale.
• Lead design and implementation of the Assistant platform, including orchestration, memory and personalization, context management, APIs, tool integrations, and backend infrastructure.
• Drive technical strategy and foundational platform investments that improve developer velocity, reliability, and scalability.
• Partner with Product, Design, Frontend, Machine Learning, and Infrastructure teams to build personalized, multimodal conversational experiences.
• Shape architectures for AI-powered applications, including retrieval, context assembly, tool execution, memory, and model orchestration.
• Establish best practices for production LLM and agent systems, including observability, logging, evaluations, safety mechanisms, rollout strategies, and incident response.
• Mentor engineers through architecture reviews, technical guidance, and engineering leadership.
• Make pragmatic architectural decisions balancing rapid iteration with long-term maintainability.
• Influence technical direction across teams and contribute to Pinterest’s broader AI platform strategy.
• Apply advances in LLMs, agentic systems, and backend platform design to consumer products.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field such as computer science, or equivalent experience.
• 10+ years of backend software engineering experience, including significant experience leading large, ambiguous systems for consumer experiences as a senior individual contributor.
• 3+ years operating as a technical lead driving architecture and development of large-scale distributed backend systems.
• Strong backend engineering experience with Python, TypeScript, Node.js, or similar ecosystems.
• Experience building platforms or foundational infrastructure that enables product teams to move faster.
• Strong understanding of modern model-driven systems and experience partnering with machine learning engineers on AI-powered products.
• Strong leadership, communication, and cross-functional collaboration skills.
• Familiarity with retrieval, ranking, personalization, inference, context management, or orchestration.
• Track record of mentoring senior engineers and elevating engineering quality across an organization.
• Product-minded, execution-oriented, and able to lead through ambiguity.
• Strong builder’s mindset and ability to establish technical foundations for systems that grow in scale, complexity, and impact.

Nice to Have

• Experience building AI-powered or LLM-based products at scale.
• Experience designing conversational AI, agent, tool-calling, or multimodal systems.
• Experience with retrieval, ranking, recommendation, search, or personalization systems.
• Familiarity with embeddings, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), context management, or memory architecture.
• Experience partnering with applied scientists or machine learning engineers to productionize ML capabilities.
• Familiarity with evaluation frameworks, experimentation, and quality frameworks for AI products.
• Full-stack development experience.

Compensation and Benefits

• Base salary: $208,592–$429,454 USD.
• Position is eligible for equity.
• Benefits and culture information are available through Pinterest resources.
• This position is not eligible for relocation assistance.