Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Pinterest is a platform where millions of people find creative ideas and plan for lasting memories. They are seeking a Sr. Staff Machine Learning Engineer to lead the technical strategy for improving their content ecosystem through machine learning, focusing on optimizing content health and performance.
Responsibilities
- Set technical strategy and vision for ML systems that improve the end-to-end content ecosystem, including supply, distribution, and engagement/utility outcomes
- Partner with DS teams to develop a content ecosystem measurement framework to quantify content health and performance (e.g., content quality, freshness, diversity, coverage, creator/content sustainability, and user value), and align it with company/business goals
- Identify and close content gaps by building models and insights that answer: what content is missing, for whom, in which contexts, and why
- Deeply understand what content works and why by combining causal thinking, experimentation, and model interpretability to connect content attributes and distribution mechanisms to downstream user and business outcomes
- Build and optimize content marketplace mechanisms that balance multi-sided incentives and constraints (e.g., users, creators/publishers, advertisers, internal policy/safety), while maximizing long-term ecosystem value
- Design multi-objective optimization approaches that manage tradeoffs across relevance, quality, diversity, creator incentives, integrity/safety, and monetization
- Partner closely with cross-functional teams (Product, Data Science, UX Research, Content/Creator teams, Trust & Safety, Ads, Infra) to translate ambiguous ecosystem problems into clear technical roadmaps and deliver measurable impact
- Mentor and grow junior ML engineers through technical coaching, design reviews, career development support, and creating a culture of strong engineering and scientific rigor
- Raise the quality bar for ML engineering by establishing best practices for data quality, model governance, reliability, privacy-aware design, and operational excellence
- Communicate clearly and influence broadly by producing crisp technical proposals, aligning stakeholders on tradeoffs, and driving decisions across org boundaries
- Explore and apply advanced methods where beneficial—e.g., game-theoretic approaches, reinforcement learning, mechanism design, or bandit-style optimization—to improve marketplace dynamics and long-term ecosystem outcomes
Skills
- Strong fundamentals in machine learning and optimization, with the ability to apply them to real-world, high-scale ecosystem problems
- Demonstrated ability to lead technical strategy, navigate ambiguity, and deliver end-to-end impact
- Deep interest in marketplace dynamics (multi-sided incentives, feedback loops, long-term health metrics), and comfort with multi-objective tradeoffs
- Experience with Cursor, Copilot, Codex, or similar AI coding assistants for development, debugging, testing, and refactoring
- Familiarity with LLM-powered productivity tools for documentation search, experiment analysis, SQL/data exploration, and engineering workflow acceleration
- Bachelor's degree in computer science, machine learning, statistics, a related field or equivalent experience
- Background in game theory, reinforcement learning, mechanism design, or causal inference applied to ecosystems/marketplaces
Benefits
- The position is also eligible for equity.
- Visit our PinFlex page to learn more about our working model.
- The role will need to be in the office for in-person collaboration 1-2 times every 6 months and therefore can be situated anywhere in the country.
- Information regarding the culture at Pinterest and benefits available for this position can be found here.
Company Overview