About the job
We are looking for an exceptional technical leader and engineering manager to help lead the search backend team that spans across Palo Alto and Seattle. The candidate will be responsible for major areas of the search engine for more than 450 million monthly active Pinterest users, including indexing and document ranking, query and content understanding, personalization, ML based retrieval, shopping, videos, as well as infrastructure efficiency and scalability. In addition, the candidate will work on innovative applications of NLP and Vision Models, and other techniques to drive query recommendations, multimodal search, agentic search, multimodal query understanding, and query based module generation and ranking.
Responsibilities
The candidate will be responsible for major areas of the search engine for more than 450 million monthly active Pinterest users, including indexing and document ranking, query and content understanding, personalization, ML based retrieval, shopping, videos, as well as infrastructure efficiency and scalability.
Work closely with the other engineering teams in Pinterest to bring superior search experience to our users, such as Search Product, Infrastructure, research and content signals.
Deeply understand the Pinterest search product, and drive the vision for the team.
Provide visibility for senior leadership into the team’s global impact.
Partner with stakeholders to expand impact across the company, including product management, data scientists and design.
Mentor and grow managers, leaders and engineers on the team.
Build a culture of excellence and expertise.
Qualifications
Minimum
Experience leading and working on a large-scale production search, recommendation or ads systems that are based on state-of-the-art machine learning and big data technology.
Ability to drive the roadmap and directions of scalable production quality systems end-to-end.
A knack for product and impact on users of a consumer product.
3+ years of experience in leading/managing a highly impactful ML-based engineering team of 5+ size; 7+ years of software development experience.
Bachelors degree in computer science or related technical field, or equivalent experience
Preferred
Applied machine learning experience is strongly preferred. Experience in related fields such as recommendation systems, natural language processing and computer vision is a bonus.
Experience using 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.