Principal Software Engineer, ML & Media Infra

Pinterest • San Francisco, CA

5d • Remote

About The Position

The ML & Media Infrastructure team enables fast, safe, and efficient delivery of AI/ML solutions across Ads and Core products. It builds unified data, training, feature, and inference infrastructure. This role sets technical direction across model training and serving, with a focus on GPU efficiency and large-scale ranking systems. The team also owns platforms for content acquisition, media ingestion, and media signal processing, and works with partner teams to strengthen Pinterest’s content foundation and meet GenAI compliance requirements.

The Principal Software Engineer will define technical vision and roadmaps for model training and serving, lead architecture for ML and media infrastructure, improve system efficiency, and build reliable platforms with strong quality guarantees. The role partners with Ads, Core AI/ML, Content, Shopping catalog, and GenAI teams, while driving cross-organizational architecture decisions and mentoring senior engineers. The position requires in-office collaboration 1–2 times per quarter and the employee must be within commuting distance of the Palo Alto, CA or San Francisco, CA office. It is not eligible for relocation assistance.

Requirements

• Track record of setting technical strategy and delivering company-wide infrastructure initiatives in ambiguous environments.
• Deep expertise in distributed ML systems, including production experience with both large-scale training and online inference.
• Strong GPU performance knowledge, such as profiling, distributed execution, kernel and memory optimization, compilation, or quantization.
• Experience with AI/ML modeling, recommender systems, Ads ranking, retrieval, feature platforms, or similarly demanding ML workloads.
• Experience with content acquisition, such as crawlers, content understanding, or near-real-time data processing.
• Experience with search and recommendation systems or ads-serving systems.
• Strong systems programming and design skills in C++, Java, or Python.
• High ownership and sound judgment in reliability, security, cost, and operational excellence.
• Demonstrated ability to use AI to improve speed and critically evaluate AI-assisted work, with accountability for correctness, quality, and sensitive data.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, a related field, or equivalent experience.
• Must be within commuting distance of the Palo Alto, CA or San Francisco, CA office for in-person collaboration 1–2 times per quarter.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical vision and roadmap for model training and serving, with reusable interfaces to data and feature infrastructure.
• Lead architectures for distributed training, fine-tuning, distillation, evaluation, and high-scale CPU/GPU inference.
• Lead architectures for content acquisition, media ingestion, and signal processing.
• Improve efficiency across data loading, distributed execution, GPU kernels and memory, compilation, quantization, scheduling, and capacity.
• Build reliable, observable platforms with strong quality guarantees and training/serving consistency.
• Partner with Ads and Core AI/ML teams to productionize features and models safely at Pinterest scale.
• Drive cross-organizational architecture decisions, migrations, and operational standards; mentor senior engineers and raise the engineering bar.
• Partner closely with Content, Shopping catalog, and GenAI teams to improve the Pinterest content ecosystem.
• Use AI-assisted development and analysis to accelerate prototyping, performance diagnosis, and validation while maintaining rigorous correctness and data safeguards.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal