Staff Software Engineer, Service Configuration Deployments

Pinterest • San Francisco, CA

7d • Remote

About The Position

Pinterest’s Service Configuration Deployment team builds platforms, APIs, and tooling for safe, scalable, reliable dynamic configuration and service coordination across services, regions, and clouds. The Staff Software Engineer owns the end-to-end technical strategy and long-term vision for configuration and coordination infrastructure, partnering with Traffic, Compute, Observability, and Cloud Architecture teams to deliver robust, high-performance systems at scale.

The role sets the direction for mission-critical configuration and coordination systems, including unified paths for feature flags, ML settings, and experiments; operational safety and governance; migration from legacy platforms; control-plane interfaces and diagnostic tools; and integration with deployment and multi-region systems. The engineer also uses AI-enabled workflows to support infrastructure design, analysis, and roadmap development, while maintaining rigorous validation, peer review, and accountability.

The role requires in-office collaboration 1–2 times every 6 months and may be based anywhere in the country. It is not eligible for relocation assistance.

Requirements

• At least 10 years of experience in high-scale infrastructure and distributed environments.
• Track record of architecting or managing business-critical backend substrates in production.
• Expertise in cross-functional technical strategy for control-plane systems such as experiments, feature flags, or ML configuration, including standardized and safe rollout methodologies.
• Advanced proficiency in distributed coordination and substrate design, including consistency models, failure domains, and resilient abstractions.
• Experience aligning configuration surfaces with deployment pipelines and orchestration frameworks such as infrastructure as code or CI/CD, with a focus on reducing architectural circularity and service-owner toil.
• Experience developing senior engineering talent and steering parallel workstreams into a unified technical vision and executable roadmap.
• Ability to use AI-enabled workflows for design synthesis, analysis, or documentation while ensuring data validation, peer review, and metric-driven verification.
• Extreme ownership and professional integrity, including safeguarding data, maintaining human-in-the-loop oversight for automated outputs, and taking responsibility for long-term architectural outcomes.
• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.

Responsibilities

• Set the long-term technical vision for configuration ecosystems and establish unified paths for feature flags, ML settings, and experiments.
• Champion operational safety through standardized validation, staged rollouts, and organization-wide governance frameworks.
• Lead migration of mission-critical use cases from legacy substrates to modern platforms.
• Establish scalable onboarding patterns that help engineering teams manage configuration lifecycles with precision and minimal friction.
• Architect next-generation control-plane interfaces and diagnostic surfaces, including high-performance, read-optimized APIs for human operators and automated assistants.
• Lead integration of coordination stacks into deployment and multi-region systems, refining service discovery and substrate architecture to support regional expansion and reduce bespoke toil and architectural circularity.
• Use AI-enabled workflows to synthesize partner requirements into executable infrastructure roadmaps, with rigorous data validation, metric-driven reviews, and peer verification.
• Elevate senior engineering talent and steer parallel workstreams toward a unified technical vision and executable roadmap.
• Safeguard data, maintain human oversight of automated outputs, and take responsibility for long-term architectural outcomes.

What This Job Offers

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