Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Pinterest is a platform that helps people discover creative ideas and plan meaningful experiences, with a mission to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love. The Staff Software Engineer will lead the technical direction, architecture, and implementation of backend systems powering AI-driven product experiences, while guiding cross-team initiatives and mentoring engineers.
Responsibilities
- Define the backend and platform architecture for AI-driven product experiences - visual-chat, AI image generation and editing, and agentic or LLM-based products - partnering with Engineering, Product, ML and UX leaders to shape the technical vision and roadmap
- Architect end-to-end systems spanning API layers, orchestration, logging, evaluation, storage and safety controls, ensuring solutions scale across multiple products and teams
- Lead resolution of complex technical challenges - e.g., scaling LLM inference for real-time features, balancing latency vs. quality in AI-generated content, and standardizing backend capabilities for reuse
- Design and implement production backend systems including API endpoints, orchestration layers, data models, caching strategies and integrations with Pinterest's LLM infrastructure
- Use AI to accelerate prototyping, evaluation design and code generation, while applying judgment and verification to ensure correctness and quality
- Create and evolve shared tooling and evaluation frameworks for LLM-based experiences, including offline eval pipelines, A/B testing hooks, quality metrics and observability
- Guide the design of projects with significant complexity and ambiguity spanning multiple teams - setting technical direction, reviewing critical design docs and driving alignment across cross-functional partners
- Raise the bar on operational excellence by improving monitoring, alerting, incident response, capacity planning and service health - and mentor engineers to develop stronger ownership habits and grow into technical leaders
Skills
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related field, or equivalent experience
- Minimum of 6 years of backend software engineering experience with a track record of leading and shipping projects with substantial impact on team-level or org-level goals
- Experience operating as a technical leader for large, ambiguous, cross-functional initiatives spanning one or more teams
- Strong Python development skills - you write idiomatic, well-structured, maintainable Python and can confidently navigate and improve large codebases
- Experience building on top of distributed systems - you've designed, built and operated services at scale, with strong judgment around caching, async processing, data storage tradeoffs, choosing existing database, indexing, and queueing solutions
- Experience building LLM-powered or ML-backed products in production - you understand model integration, prompt and orchestration strategies, evaluation, latency/cost tradeoffs and operational challenges of AI-backed services
- Demonstrated ability to use AI to improve speed and quality in your day-to-day workflow, with a clear approach to validating accuracy and quality of AI-assisted work
- High integrity and ownership: you protect sensitive data, avoid over-reliance on AI and remain accountable for final decisions and deliverables
- 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
- US based applicants only
Benefits
- The position is also eligible for equity.
- In-person collaboration 1-2 times/quarter, with the role able to be situated anywhere in the country.
Company Overview
Company H1B Sponsorship