Staff Software Engineer, Storage Services

Pinterest•New York, NY

10h•$177,185 - $364,795•Hybrid

About The Position

The Storage Services team operates Pinterest's scalable online structured data storage platform—supporting both SQL-based table models and complex graph data structures—managing 100TB+ datasets and serving over 1.5M queries per second across many of Pinterest's most important products. We're looking for an exceptional Staff Software Engineer to lead the technical strategy and execution of our storage infrastructure initiatives, defining how these systems are designed, built, and operated. You'll drive innovation across distributed SQL, high-throughput/low-latency query processing, graph workloads, and the developer experience for storage clients.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in computer science, a related field or equivalent experience.
8+ years of hands-on backend software engineering experience in large-scale distributed systems.
Experience building and/or managing core infrastructure systems at scale, preferably in online structured data storage, distributed databases, or large-scale data platforms.
Hands-on experience building and operating highly available, reliable, production-grade systems at scale, including incident response, capacity planning, schema/architecture evolution, and performance tuning.
Strong understanding of at least one of: Distributed SQL or NoSQL databases and their internals (e.g., sharding, replication, consensus, transaction processing), or Large-scale graph or relationship-oriented data stores and query patterns.
Experience working with or migrating to modern distributed storage/database technologies (experience with systems like TiDB or similar is a strong plus).
Demonstrated technical leadership in setting roadmap and driving execution — including defining technical direction, leading engineering alignment, and partnering across teams to deliver complex platform investments.
Strong problem-solving skills and analytical mindset, with the ability to use data to guide decisions.
Experience coding in one of the following languages: Java, Python and/or C/C++.
Demonstrated experience leveraging AI to accelerate development, enhance operations, and improve customer support.

Nice To Haves

experience with systems like TiDB or similar is a strong plus

Responsibilities

Provide technical guidance and direction to a high-performing team building reliable, performant, and cost-efficient storage systems that operate at massive scale and power business-critical applications across the company.
Lead the architecture, design, and evolution of online structured storage services supporting both SQL/table-style and graph-style workloads over large-scale datasets.
Drive cross-functional strategic initiatives to modernize the storage tech stack—including transitioning datasets and workloads onto the TiDB backend—while advancing reliability, scalability, cost efficiency, and developer velocity.
Improve query throughput and latency across systems handling 100TB+ datasets and 1.5M+ queries per second, using rigorous measurement, experimentation, and performance engineering.
Use AI to accelerate system design and decision-making—prototyping approaches, exploring and comparing architectural options, and synthesizing findings—while applying judgment and verification to ensure correctness and quality.
Use AI to automate repeatable operational work (documentation, runbooks, reporting, and QA checks), freeing the team to focus on high-leverage engineering.
Serve on the Storage Services on-call rotation—monitoring, responding to alerts, diagnosing and resolving critical issues, and communicating status—and set the bar for technical excellence through strong design reviews, operational readiness, and blameless post-incident reviews.
Mentor senior engineers, developing the next generation of storage infrastructure leaders and technical experts.