Principal Engineer, Core - Pinner Journeys
Pinterest · San Francisco, CA, US; Remote, US
About this role
**About Pinterest** Millions of people use Pinterest to find creative ideas, dream about new possibilities, and plan memories that last a lifetime. At Pinterest, our mission is to bring everyone inspiration to create a life they love—powered by the people behind the product. **About the role** Pinterest is seeking a **Principal Engineer** to set the technical vision and lead foundational work across **Homefeed, Search, and emerging AI Assistant** experiences. This role sits at the intersection of **relevance, ranking, retrieval, and generative AI**, shaping how hundreds of millions of Pinners discover and act on inspiration every day. You’ll operate as a cross-cutting technical leader—defining long-term architecture, raising the bar on **ML and systems excellence**, and partnering with product and executive leadership to drive step-function improvements in **engagement, quality, and creator value**. --- **What you’ll do** - Define the long-term technical strategy and architecture for **Homefeed, Search, and AI Assistant**, including **retrieval, ranking, personalization, and generative** experiences. - Drive a multi-year roadmap for unifying **signals, features, and models** across surfaces to deliver a coherent, high-quality discovery experience. - Lead the design and adoption of large-scale **retrieval and ranking systems** (e.g., multi-stage retrieval, representation learning, multi-objective optimization) to improve relevance and monetization. - Architect how **LLMs and foundation models** integrate with the core discovery stack (e.g., query understanding, intent modeling, content understanding, conversation orchestration, safety/guardrails). - Set technical direction for **experimentation, measurement, and evaluation** (offline metrics, online experimentation, and causal inference for discovery and generative use cases). - Provide hands-on technical leadership on a small number of high-leverage projects: design critical components, review designs/PRs, de-risk complex launches, and mentor senior engineers and staff+ TLs. - Partner deeply with **Product, Data Science, Research, and Design** to frame the right problems and translate product bets into robust technical plans—solving for long-term platform health. - Raise the bar for engineering excellence: **reliability, performance, security/privacy, cost efficiency, and operational health** of large-scale ML systems. - Represent Pinterest externally for these domains (talks, publications, partnerships) and help attract and grow top talent. - Report into Pinterest’s **Core Engineering leadership** and work horizontally across multiple product and platform teams responsible for Homefeed, Search, and AI Assistant. - Spend a meaningful portion of your time on hands-on technical work (design, reviews, prototyping) while also driving long-term strategy, standards, and alignment. - Be measured on durable technical impact: system-level improvements, model/product outcomes, reduced complexity and operational risk, and growth of leaders and capabilities. --- **What we’re looking for** - **15+ years** of industry experience in large-scale systems and/or machine learning, with a track record of impact in **search, recommendations, feeds, or conversational AI**. - Proven experience as a **Principal Engineer, Architect, or equivalent** senior technical leader driving cross-org technical strategy and execution. - Deep expertise in at least **two** of the following (and strong familiarity with
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