Staff Software Engineer, TwoTwenty

Pinterest•San Francisco, CA

1d•Remote

About The Position

Pinterest is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to lead the technical direction of the backend systems powering Pinterest's AI-driven product experiences. This includes areas like Pinterest Assistant, visual editing and content creation tools, and future LLM-based products. The role involves designing and shipping backend systems, architecting the broader platform strategy for scalability across surfaces and teams. It's a hands-on leadership position requiring deep technical execution, system-level architecture, and cross-team technical leadership. Pinterest emphasizes the use of AI as a partner in creativity and impact, and candidates are expected to be excited about this aspect. The interview process will assess foundational skills and collaboration with AI, focusing on the candidate's approach and thinking process.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
Minimum of 6 years of backend software engineering experience with a track record of leading and shipping projects with substantial impact on team-level or org-level goals.
Experience operating as a technical leader for large, ambiguous, cross-functional initiatives spanning one or more teams.
Strong Python development skills; ability to write idiomatic, well-structured, maintainable Python and navigate/improve large codebases.
Experience building on top of distributed systems; designed, built, and operated services at scale, with strong judgment around caching, async processing, data storage tradeoffs, choosing existing database, indexing, and queueing solutions.
Experience building LLM-powered or ML-backed products in production; understanding of model integration, prompt and orchestration strategies, evaluation, latency/cost tradeoffs, and operational challenges of AI-backed services.
Demonstrated ability to use AI to improve speed and quality in day-to-day workflow, with a clear approach to validating accuracy and quality of AI-assisted work.
High integrity and ownership: protect sensitive data, avoid over-reliance on AI, and remain accountable for final decisions and deliverables.

Responsibilities

Define the backend and platform architecture for AI-driven product experiences, including visual-chat, AI image generation and editing, and agentic or LLM-based products.
Partner with Engineering, Product, ML, and UX leaders to shape the technical vision and roadmap.
Architect end-to-end systems covering API layers, orchestration, logging, evaluation, storage, and safety controls, ensuring scalability across multiple products and teams.
Lead the resolution of complex technical challenges, such as scaling LLM inference for real-time features, balancing latency vs. quality in AI-generated content, and standardizing backend capabilities for reuse.
Design and implement production backend systems, including API endpoints, orchestration layers, data models, caching strategies, and integrations with Pinterest's LLM infrastructure.
Utilize AI to accelerate prototyping, evaluation design, and code generation, applying judgment and verification for correctness and quality.
Create and evolve shared tooling and evaluation frameworks for LLM-based experiences, including offline eval pipelines, A/B testing hooks, quality metrics, and observability.
Guide the design of projects with significant complexity and ambiguity spanning multiple teams, setting technical direction, reviewing critical design docs, and driving alignment.
Improve operational excellence by enhancing monitoring, alerting, incident response, capacity planning, and service health.
Mentor engineers to develop stronger ownership habits and grow into technical leaders.