Staff Software Engineer, Ads & Core Serving Platform

Pinterest • Palo Alto, CA

7h • $208,454 - $364,795 • Hybrid

About The Position

Pinterest is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to help evolve the serving platforms that power Ads and Core experiences. You will lead large-scale, low-latency distributed-system initiatives that make our serving stack more performant, reliable, observable, and easier to extend. You will work across Ads and Core engineering teams to define durable platform capabilities, modernize frameworks, and unlock faster product iteration with high confidence in production.

Requirements

• 8+ years of software engineering experience building and operating production backend or distributed systems.
• Experience leading complex technical initiatives across teams or organizations.
• Strong expertise in distributed systems, online serving, low-latency services, or infrastructure platforms.
• Demonstrated ability to make sound tradeoffs across latency, reliability, scalability, cost, and developer experience.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills with technical and cross-functional partners.
• Proficiency in one or more programming languages such as Java, C++, Go, or Python.
• Experience mentoring engineers and elevating technical standards.
• Demonstrated ability to use AI to improve the speed and quality of day-to-day engineering workflows, with a rigorous approach to testing, validation, and responsible use.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related technical field, or equivalent experience.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with ads delivery, recommendation or search serving, retrieval, ranking, or experimentation systems.
• Experience with serving-framework migrations, platform consolidation, or developer tooling.
• Experience with observability, production debugging, traffic management, or incident response.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction and lead architecture for major serving-platform initiatives across Ads and Core.
• Build and operate scalable, highly available systems with clear performance, reliability, and efficiency goals.
• Partner with product, ML, infrastructure, and Core/Ads engineering teams to translate complex requirements into reusable platform capabilities.
• Improve the serving stack through framework modernization, API evolution, experimentation controls, observability, and debugging tools.
• Lead complex projects end to end: technical strategy, design, implementation, rollout, adoption, and operational readiness.
• Use AI to accelerate analysis, debugging, design exploration, and iteration while applying sound engineering judgment and validation.
• Raise the quality bar through design reviews, code reviews, documentation, and operational excellence.
• Mentor engineers and scale technical leadership across the organization.

Benefits

• The position is also eligible for equity.
• Information regarding the culture at Pinterest and benefits available for this position can be found here.

What This Job Offers

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