Staff Software Engineer, TwoTwenty
Leads the technical direction and hands-on development of scalable backend platforms for Pinterest’s AI-driven products. Requires extensive backend and distributed-systems experience, strong Python skills, production LLM or ML experience, and cross-functional technical leadership.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Define backend and platform architecture for AI-driven product experiences, including visual chat, AI image generation and editing, and LLM-based products.
- Architect scalable end-to-end systems spanning APIs, orchestration, logging, evaluation, storage, and safety controls.
- Resolve complex technical challenges involving real-time LLM inference, latency and quality tradeoffs, and reusable backend capabilities.
- Design and implement production backend systems, including API endpoints, orchestration layers, data models, caching strategies, and LLM infrastructure integrations.
- Create and evolve tooling and evaluation frameworks for LLM experiences, including offline evaluation pipelines, A/B testing, quality metrics, and observability.
- Provide technical direction for complex, ambiguous, cross-team projects; review design documents and drive alignment.
- Improve monitoring, alerting, incident response, capacity planning, and service health.
- Mentor engineers and help develop stronger ownership and technical leadership.
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
- At least 6 years of backend software engineering experience delivering high-impact projects.
- Experience leading large, ambiguous, cross-functional technical initiatives.
- Strong Python development skills and experience navigating large codebases.
- Experience designing, building, and operating distributed services at scale.
- Strong judgment regarding caching, asynchronous processing, data storage, databases, indexing, and queueing systems.
- Experience building LLM-powered or ML-backed products in production, including model integration, prompt and orchestration strategies, evaluation, latency and cost tradeoffs, and operational challenges.
- Ability to use AI tools effectively while validating the accuracy and quality of AI-assisted work.
- High integrity, ownership, and accountability when handling sensitive data and deliverables.
Compensation
- Base salary: $177,185–$364,795 USD
- Eligible for equity.
Skills
Python, Distributed Systems, LLMs, Machine Learning, API Design, Caching, Asynchronous Processing, Databases, Indexing, Queueing Systems, A/B Testing, Observability, Data Modeling, Monitoring, Incident Response
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