Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Programmatic Ads

Pinterest•Palo Alto, CA

10d•$222,716 - $389,753•Hybrid

About The Position

Pinterest is building a new Programmatic Ads ML team to bring in exchange-sourced ads demand and supply. We’re looking for a Staff ML engineer to develop core bidding and ranking systems that help us optimally buy and sell inventory across exchanges, driving strong ROI for advertisers and growing a critical revenue stream for Pinterest. 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. Pinterest is an equal opportunity employer and makes employment decisions on the basis of merit. We want to have the best qualified people in every job. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion or religious creed, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, status as a protected veteran, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information or characteristics (or those of a family member) or any other consideration made unlawful by applicable federal, state or local laws. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you require a medical or religious accommodation during the job application process, please complete this form for support.

Requirements

Industry experience building and shipping large-scale production ML systems in ads, search, recommendations, or related domains.
Deep experience with control/optimization algorithms for bidding, pacing, allocation, or similar marketplace problems.
Strength in probabilistic modeling and measurement (e.g., quality/fraud signals, deep-learning engagement prediction) and making principled trade-offs between coverage, accuracy, and impact.
Proven Staff-level technical leadership as an IC: driving technical direction and cross-team alignment without formal people management.
Demonstrated ability to use AI to improve speed and quality of your workflow, with a strong track record of validating and stress-testing AI-assisted outputs.
Degree in Computer Science, Statistics, or a related field.
Experience with 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.

Responsibilities

Design and implement algorithms for real-time bidding, ad scoring/ranking, inventory selection, and yield optimization across multiple exchanges.
Own end-to-end ML systems: problem framing, metrics, data/feature design, model training, evaluation, and online experimentation.
Introduce and productionize new exchange and supply signals (e.g., quality, conversions, identity, fraud, content understanding) to unlock incremental advertiser value.
Partner closely with Ads Ranking & Bidding, Measurement, and Programmatic Engineering to integrate new models and objectives into the ads stack.
Use AI to accelerate analysis, experimentation, and iteration (e.g., exploring model variants, automating path from learnings to launch) while applying strong judgment and vision.