Staff Software Engineer, Growth AI
208k – 365kSan Francisco, CAPalo Alto, CASeattle, WALos Angeles, CAHybrid8+ YOE
Summary
Staff Software Engineer anchoring AI-powered growth products across SEO and exploratory teams. Architect production ML systems, partner with ML orgs, and set technical direction as a senior IC.
About the role
What you'll do
- Architect and build the production systems that AI/ML capabilities ship through across two Growth teams: APIs, data pipelines, content systems, evaluation and monitoring infrastructure.
- Partner with Pinterest's centralized ML org and applied research teams to productize AI/ML capabilities at scale — defining service interfaces, building eval pipelines, and managing latency, cost, and quality tradeoffs.
- Design and build the cross-team technical foundations that serve both teams: AI evaluation systems, content quality pipelines, agent skill platform, knowledge brain.
- Set the technical bar across two teams operating an AI-native engineering model: AI in every part of the SDLC, eval-driven shipping, prototype-first culture.
- Mentor engineers across both teams as a peer Staff IC, deepening their technical work without managing them.
What we're looking for
- 8+ years of product / systems engineering experience, with a strong track record shipping production systems at scale that touch real users.
- Cross-team technical leadership: you've been the architectural anchor on multi-team initiatives, set direction others build on, and mentored through code.
- Working knowledge of common ML/AI techniques (supervised learning, embeddings, ranking, LLMs, evaluation methodology) — enough to scope ML projects, reason about ML system design, and collaborate effectively with MLEs.
- Strong track record partnering with ML/research teams to ship AI-powered features in production.
- Demonstrated AI-augmented engineering practice — fluent use of Cursor / Claude Code / agentic tools, with a clear approach to validating AI-generated work.
- Bachelor’s/Master’s degree in a relevant field such as Computer Science, or equivalent experience.
Nice to have
- Direct hands-on experience shipping applied ML, LLM/VLM, or agentic systems in production
- Domain experience in search, discovery, recommendations, ranking, growth, or SEO
- Experience as the product-engineering counterpart on an AI-first product launch from prototype to scale
Skills
PythonJavaScalaMachine LearningLLMsEmbeddingsRanking SystemsAPIsData PipelinesEvaluation Systems
Similar roles at this salary range
All Backend Engineering jobs →Staff Backend Engineer
Staff Backend Engineer to architect and scale voice AI systems for 911 centers, optimizing realtime pipelines and integrating with customer systems. Requires 6+ years of experience and strong engineering fundamentals.
180k – 240kSeattle, WABackend EngineeringOn-siteGoSQL
Staff Backend Engineer, Search
Staff-level search engineer responsible for designing, scaling, and optimizing ClickUp's search infrastructure using OpenSearch/ElasticSearch, including real-time indexing, vector search, and relevance tuning.
250k – 300kUnited StatesBackend EngineeringRemoteNLPIndexing