Staff Software Engineer, Storage Services
Leads the technical strategy, architecture, and operation of Pinterest’s large-scale storage infrastructure supporting SQL and graph workloads. Requires 8+ years of backend distributed-systems experience, technical leadership, and expertise in production reliability, performance tuning, and modern database technologies.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Provide technical guidance and direction to a team building reliable, performant, and cost-efficient storage systems at massive scale.
- Lead the architecture, design, and evolution of online structured storage services supporting SQL/table-style and graph-style workloads.
- Drive modernization initiatives, including migrating datasets and workloads to the TiDB backend.
- Improve query throughput and latency for systems handling 100TB+ datasets and 1.5M+ queries per second through measurement, experimentation, and performance engineering.
- Use AI for system design, architectural evaluation, documentation, runbooks, reporting, and QA automation, with appropriate verification.
- Participate in the Storage Services on-call rotation, resolve critical incidents, and lead design reviews, operational readiness, and blameless post-incident reviews.
- Mentor senior engineers and develop storage infrastructure technical leaders.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, a related field, or equivalent experience.
- 8+ years of hands-on backend software engineering experience in large-scale distributed systems.
- Experience building or managing core infrastructure systems at scale, preferably online structured data storage, distributed databases, or large-scale data platforms.
- Experience building and operating highly available, reliable production systems, including incident response, capacity planning, schema or architecture evolution, and performance tuning.
- Strong understanding of distributed SQL or NoSQL databases and their internals, or large-scale graph and relationship-oriented data stores.
- Experience with modern distributed storage or database technologies; TiDB or similar systems are a plus.
- Technical leadership experience setting roadmaps, defining technical direction, aligning engineers, and delivering complex platform investments.
- Strong problem-solving and analytical skills, using data to guide decisions.
- Experience coding in Java, Python, and/or C/C++.
- Experience leveraging AI to accelerate development, improve operations, and enhance customer support.
Compensation
- Base salary: $177,185–$364,795 USD.
- Eligible for equity.
- Benefits information is available through Pinterest.
Skills
Distributed Systems, Backend Engineering, Distributed Sql, Nosql Databases, Graph Databases, Tidb, Query Processing, Performance Engineering, Java, Python, C/C++, Incident Response, Capacity Planning, AI
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