Senior Manager, Machine Learning Engineering-Applied Research

Responsibilities

• Own the technical roadmap and strategic vision for next-generation recommendation systems.
• Champion state-of-the-art machine learning techniques for recommendation technology.
• Transition breakthrough machine learning research into production-ready systems that impact core company metrics.
• Manage, inspire, and develop machine learning researchers and engineers specializing in recommendation systems.
• Define the team charter while balancing cutting-edge research with foundational embeddings that benefit products across the company.
• Collaborate with Core Engineering, Ads Engineering, Infrastructure, Content, and Data Science teams to prototype, build, and scale solutions.
• Partner with leadership to deepen user understanding and set the strategic direction for the recommendation-system roadmap.
• Deliver high-impact initiatives across multiple product areas and influence peers and leadership using data-driven insights.
• Mentor, coach, and up-level software and machine learning engineers.
• Translate ambiguous questions into well-defined projects with clear success metrics.
• Distill complex technical findings for leadership and product teams.

Requirements

• 7+ years of combined post-graduate academic and industry experience applying state-of-the-art machine learning technologies to real-world problems on web-scale data.
• 3+ years of direct people-management experience.
• Track record of delivering high-impact initiatives across multiple product areas.
• Experience mentoring, coaching, and developing software and machine learning engineers.
• Strong communication skills and credibility with technical, product, and leadership audiences.
• Strong track record of publications in machine learning, AI, data science, or related technical fields.
• Master's or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, NLP, Statistics, Information Sciences, or a related field.

Nice-to-haves

• Publications at top-tier ML or RecSys conferences, including KDD, RecSys, NeurIPS, or CVPR.
• Experience with modern LLM and agentic workflows.
• Experience using generative AI to accelerate engineering productivity and context extraction.

Compensation and Benefits

• Base salary range: $227,871–$469,147 USD.
• The position is also eligible for equity.
• Benefits information is available through Pinterest's career materials.
• The role requires in-person collaboration 1–2 times per quarter and can be situated anywhere in the country.
• The position is not eligible for relocation assistance.