Staff Software Engineer, Activation Team

Pinterest • San Francisco, CA

15d • 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.
As a Staff Engineer on the Activation team, you'll drive the technical strategy and execution for backend systems that power Pinterest's new and returning user experience. This is a high-impact role in a growth engineering org focused on helping users find value on Pinterest quickly, identifying the right technical problems to solve, and moving fast to drive measurable results.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience building and shipping large-scale backend systems at consumer internet companies
• 2+ years of experience as a senior IC driving cross-team projects with measurable business impact
• Strong product mindset with the ability to identify which technical problems matter most for business impact
• Track record of rapid execution and driving projects to completion in ambiguous environments
• Strong systems design skills across distributed systems, event-driven architectures, and service-oriented backends
• Familiarity with ML infrastructure concepts and ability to build systems that support ML workloads
• Strong collaboration and communication skills across engineering and product audiences
• Experience mentoring engineers and establishing technical best practices
• Demonstrated ability to use AI to accelerate your workflow while maintaining high standards for verification, data integrity, and ownership of final outputs
• Degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical roadmap for activation backend systems, defining the highest-impact opportunities for new and returning users
• Drive hands-on backend engineering across APIs, event pipelines, production systems, and recommendation serving
• Build signal infrastructure that captures user intent from entry points and makes it available to recommendation systems
• Collaborate closely with ML engineers, building the backend infrastructure that ML models depend on
• Partner with product managers and data scientists to translate user problems into technical opportunities
• Drive cross-team technical initiatives, authoring design documents and building alignment across engineering orgs
• Own system reliability, production readiness, and operational health for activation backend systems
• Mentor and develop engineers on the team

What This Job Offers

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