Senior Staff Software Engineer, Configuration & Coordination

Pinterest•San Francisco, CA

6d•$208,592 - $429,454•Remote

About The Position

Pinterest’s Service Configuration & Coordination team builds the platforms, APIs, and tooling that make dynamic configuration and service coordination safe, scalable, and reliable for every service across regions and clouds, serving as the central hub for cross-functional alignment and system orchestration. As a Senior Staff Software Engineer (IC17), you’ll own the end-to-end technical strategy and long-term vision for our configuration and coordination infrastructure. You’ll define the future of these mission-critical systems, partnering closely with Traffic, Compute, Observability, and Cloud Architecture teams to deliver robust, high-performance solutions at scale.

Requirements

Decade-plus mastery in high-scale infrastructure and distributed environments, with a track record of architecting or managing business-critical backend substrates in production settings.
Proven expertise in orchestrating cross-functional technical strategies for control-plane systems (e.g., experiments, feature flags, or ML config), unifying disparate teams around standardized and safe rollout methodologies.
Advanced proficiency in distributed coordination and substrate design—capable of navigating complex consistency models, failure domains, and the engineering of resilient, high-leverage abstractions.
Experience aligning configuration surfaces with deployment pipelines and orchestration frameworks (e.g., IaC or CI/CD), with a focus on mitigating architectural circularity and reducing service owner toil.
History of elevating senior engineering talent while steering parallel workstreams, synthesizing loosely coupled initiatives into a unified technical vision and executable roadmap.
Ability to catalyze execution via AI-enabled workflows (e.g., design synthesis, analytical phases, or documentation) while ensuring rigorous accountability through data validation, peer review, and metric-driven verification.
Extreme ownership and professional integrity: dedicated to safeguarding data, maintaining human-in-the-loop oversight for automated outputs, and taking full responsibility for long-term architectural outcomes.
Bachelor’s/Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.

Responsibilities

Orchestrate the long-term technical vision for configuration ecosystems to ensure feature flags, ML settings, and experiments utilize unified paved paths.
Champion operational safety through standardized validation, staged rollout mechanisms, and robust governance frameworks across the organization.
Spearhead the transition from legacy substrates by migrating mission-critical use cases to modern platforms.
Establish scalable onboarding patterns that enable engineering teams to evolve their configuration lifecycle with precision and minimal friction.
Architect the next generation of control plane interfaces and diagnostic surfaces.
Engineer high-performance, read-optimized APIs to empower human operators and automated assistants to seamlessly manage and reason about complex production states.
Direct the integration of coordination stacks within the broader deployment and multi-region landscape.
Refine service discovery and substrate architecture to accelerate regional expansion while eliminating bespoke toil and architectural circularity.
Leverage AI to catalyze infrastructure design and analytical phases, utilizing assistant-enabled workflows to synthesize partner requirements into executable roadmaps.
Maintain absolute accountability through rigorous data validation, metric-driven reviews, and comprehensive peer verification.