Sr. Staff Software Engineer, AI Platform

About Pinterest Millions of people around the world come to our platform to find creative ideas, dream about new possibilities and plan for memories that will last a lifetime. At Pinterest, we’re on a mission to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love, and that starts with the people behind the product.

Discover a career where you ignite innovation for millions, transform passion into growth opportunities, celebrate each other’s unique experiences and embrace the flexibility to do your best work. Creating a career you love? It’s Possible.

At Pinterest, AI isn’t just a feature, it’s a powerful partner that augments our creativity and amplifies our impact, and we’re looking for candidates who are excited to be a part of that. To get a complete picture of your experience and abilities, we’ll explore your foundational skills and how you collaborate with AI.

Through our interview process, what matters most is that you can always explain your approach, showing us not just what you know, but how you think. You can read more about our AI interview philosophy and how we use AI in our recruiting process here.

The AI Platform team delivers essential tools and infrastructure utilized by hundreds of AI and ML engineers across Pinterest, powering crucial functions such as recommendations, ads, visual search, growth/notifications, and trust and safety. Our primary objectives are to ensure AI and ML systems maintain production-grade quality and enable rapid iteration for our customers.

As a Senior Staff Software Engineer on the AI Platform team, you will shape and scale Pinterest’s AI/ML evaluation platform into a unified, reliable system adopted company-wide. You will identify modernization opportunities, elevate the roadmap, and execute technical strategy of a durable evaluation system for GenAI and ML workloads at Pinterest, partnering across engineering, research, product, and safety to improve quality, launch decisions, and trust in AI-powered experiences.

What You’ll Do

• Identify modernization opportunities and scale the roadmap for a company-wide evaluation system in partnership with technical leadership
• Define cross-team technical strategy, align partner teams, and drive broad adoption of shared evaluation capabilities
• Make durable architectural decisions that improve the user experience and reliability of Pinterest’s AI/ML evaluation platform
• Establish evaluation methodologies and standards that balance automated metrics, expert judgment, human feedback, safety, and business outcomes
• Lead complex cross-team workstreams, resolve technical tradeoffs and risks, and deliver impact

What We’re Looking For

• 3+ years of deep, hands-on experience designing and operating evaluation systems for GenAI and complex ML systems, including benchmark design, golden datasets, automated metrics, human evaluation, model-based grading, and failure analysis
• Strong programming skills in Python coupled with a solid grasp of distributed systems principles, and comfortable iterating with AI tools on coding and design
• Deep familiarity with GenAI and RecSys evaluation libraries and frameworks, AutoEvals, OpenEvals, Ragas, etc
• 5+ years of experience building scalable platforms for distributed experimentation, data and model versioning, orchestration, observability, release management, and production monitoring
• Strong judgment around GenAI risks, including robustness, bias, privacy, security, and the limitations of automated evaluation signals
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience

In-Office Requirement Statement

• We let the type of work you do guide the collaboration style. That means we’re not always working in an office, but we continue to gather for key moments of collaboration and connection.
• This role will need to be in the office for in-person collaboration 1-2 times/quarter and therefore can be situated anywhere in the country.

Relocation Statement:

• This position is not eligible for relocation assistance. Visit our PinFlex page to learn more about our working model.

At Pinterest we believe the workplace should be equitable, inclusive, and inspiring for every employee. In an effort to provide greater transparency, we are sharing the base salary range for this position. The position is also eligible for equity. Final salary is based on a number of factors including location, travel, …