Sr. Staff Software Engineer, Merchants

Pinterest • Palo Alto, CA

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

Millions of people around the world come to our platform to find creative ideas, dream about new possibilities and plan for memories that will last a lifetime. At Pinterest, we’re on a mission to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love, and that starts with the people behind the product.
Discover a career where you ignite innovation for millions, transform passion into growth opportunities, celebrate each other’s unique experiences and embrace the flexibility to do your best work. Creating a career you love? It’s Possible.
At Pinterest, AI isn't just a feature, it's a powerful partner that augments our creativity and amplifies our impact, and we’re looking for candidates who are excited to be a part of that. To get a complete picture of your experience and abilities, we’ll explore your foundational skills and how you collaborate with AI.
Through our interview process, what matters most is that you can always explain your approach, showing us not just what you know, but how you think. You can read more about our AI interview philosophy and how we use AI in our recruiting process here.
Our Merchants organization focuses on onboarding and activation, catalog quality and health, merchant presence (including creator/UGC and trust signals), and ads upsell—helping merchants build healthy catalogs, reach the right audiences, and unlock clear paths to growth.
In this role, you’ll lead high-impact engineering at the intersection of commerce platforms, catalog systems, and AI-native experiences. This includes applying ML, AI-assisted workflows, and GenAI where appropriate to improve metadata quality, merchant tooling, and operational efficiency. You’ll partner closely with Engineering Managers, Product Managers, Data Scientists, and other senior engineers to deliver systems with measurable business and user impact.

Requirements

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including meaningful time as a Staff, Senior Staff, or equivalent-level IC building and operating complex production systems.
• Strong track record in commerce, marketplaces, ads, or other adjacent large-scale domains, including leadership on cross-team technical initiatives.
• Deep experience in systems design, API design, and data-intensive systems, with the ability to navigate tradeoffs in performance, reliability, and scalability.
• Experience building or partnering on ML-, AI-, or GenAI-adjacent systems, with a pragmatic understanding of where these technologies add value and how to deploy them responsibly.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to influence technical direction without directly owning every implementation detail.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field—or equivalent practical experience.

Nice To Haves

• Catalog, integrations, or merchant platform experience is a strong plus.
• Experience with growth, measurement, funnel optimization, or organic-to-paid ecosystems is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end technical delivery for cross-team initiatives—from problem framing and technical strategy through architecture, implementation, rollout, and iteration.
• Shape catalog and integration systems for scale, reliability, and quality, ensuring merchant data is deep, broad, fresh, and actionable across partners, formats, and key signals such as inventory and pricing where relevant.
• Build and evolve ML-, GenAI-, and AI-assisted merchant experiences with strong validation and guardrails—for example, metadata enrichment, gap-filling, and internal tools that improve catalog health without compromising trust.
• Contribute to merchant onboarding and activation systems that span teams, creating streamlined flows, signals, and decisioning pathways that improve approval rates, merchant quality, and time to value.
• Partner where appropriate on organic attribution, merchant insights, and data-driven pathways from organic success to paid products, ensuring strategy is measurable rather than anecdotal.
• Drive technical decisions using clear tradeoffs across revenue, conversion, catalog health, engagement, and Torso success.
• Mentor senior engineers and raise the bar for technical design, engineering quality, and production readiness across the organization.
• Use AI to accelerate your own work—across exploration, drafting, analysis, and synthesis—while maintaining strong judgment, rigorous validation, and accountability for outcomes.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Number of Employees: 501-1,000 employees