Staff Software Engineer, Merchants & Ads Review

Pinterest • Palo Alto, CA

2d • 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.
We’re hiring a Staff Software Engineer for Merchants & Ads Review.
This team is responsible for keeping our platform safe from malicious advertisers, low-quality merchants, and policy violating ads, while helping the business grow revenue and expand to new markets, verticals, policies, and ad types.
In this role, you’ll lead our AI-first efforts, building and evolving our review systems. You’ll partner closely with Engineering Managers, Product Managers, and experts from Policy, Legal, and Trust & Safety to drive our systems forward. You act as a mentor to the rest of the team, helping them grow their careers and accelerate their velocity with AI tooling. This is a high agency, high impact role with a broad scope and direct levers on both revenue and platform safety.

Requirements

• 8+ 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 ads, commerce, trust & safety, or GenAI.
• Deep experience in systems design, full-stack software engineering, 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.
• Demonstrated experience building and enhancing cross-functional partnerships with other teams and organizations.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field—or equivalent practical experience.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end technical delivery for cross-team initiatives—from problem framing and technical strategy through architecture, implementation, rollout, and iteration.
• Build and evolve ML-, GenAI-, and AI-assisted merchant, ad, and advertiser review experiences with strong validation and guardrails.
• Mentor junior and senior engineers and raise the bar for technical design, engineering quality, and production readiness across the team.
• Partner with cross-functional stakeholders on a variety of projects to improve the safety of our platform, increase efficiency, reduce time to spend, and generate revenue
• 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