Staff Technical Program Manager, Search Relevance

Pinterest•San Francisco, CA

2d•$145,747 - $300,067•Remote

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. At Pinterest, our mission is to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love, and as a Technical Program Manager on the Search team, you'll play a crucial role in this mission. You’ll be a thought leader with Product and Engineering on crafting a seamless search and shopping experience for Pinners. Questions you’ll have to tackle with the team include: 1/ How might we better understand when a Pinner has commercial intent and change our search strategy accordingly? 2/ How do we enable new merchants to succeed on Pinterest as a platform while continuing to help our successful merchants become more successful? 3/ What signals and content can we acquire and build to build a better search and shopping experience? 4/ How do we measure Search quality and relevance on the platform?

Requirements

BS in a technical discipline or equivalent experience (7+ years in a technical or analytical role).
Strong technical breadth and judgment - ability to quickly ramp up and go deep on a range of technologies, ability to identify technical risks and tradeoffs.
Comfort with a fast-changing environment and ability to manage ambiguity.
Focus on execution and delivery in a data-informed environment.
Excellent communication skills and ability to work cross-functionally to identify opportunities and deliver solutions.
Exceptional relationship-building skills, organizational awareness, and ability to persuade others to accomplish program objectives while holding yourself and your team to a high standard of accountability.
Experience working with Search products at a low level of detail highly desirable.
AI-first execution mindset: demonstrated ability to use GenAI to accelerate planning, program operations, and stakeholder communications—starting with AI drafts and applying strong judgment to validate, refine, and drive decisions.
Workflow design, AI fluency, data & insights orientation: experience turning repeatable program work into durable, low-toil mechanisms and improving decision-making by using GenAI (e.g., strong prompting, vibe coding lightweight scripts/tools, dashboards, data analysis and leveraging agents where appropriate).
Safety-by-design AI fluency: experience operating within AI governance expectations (risk assessment, data handling, model/output validation, auditability/traceability) and proactively identifying where AI use is not appropriate or requires additional controls.

Responsibilities

Establish and own relationships with key partners across Search teams as their strategic and execution partner for delivering high impact programs.
Define and drive Search, Relevance, and Merchant ML/AI programs based on current and emerging needs, ensuring scope, responsibilities, and ownership are well-established, risks are proactively identified and mitigated and that programs are executed and landed successfully.
Lead the day-to-day program management of multiple work streams across the product process, including product strategy, technical design, and experimentation.
Analyze merchant distribution and shopping experiences in partnership with Data Science; leverage these insights to lead strategy steering committees with cross-functional VPs.
Build a subject-matter-expertise on query understanding and search engines.
Drive product, business, and OKR requirements while also streamlining engineering efforts and cost.
Identify gaps in shopping and search distribution strategy (i.e. signals, content, etc.) and operationalize processes to close those gaps.
Own and scale the headcount and roadmap planning process for a large engineering org.
Drive High-Ambiguity strategic bets: Act as the core delivery powerhouse for high-impact, fast-moving experiments. Translate ambitious executive visions into highly executable, phased project plans.
Manage the overarching portfolio of programs within the org and mentor junior TPMs to optimize resource allocation and uplevel team performance.
Use GenAI as the default operating model for EP PgM execution—producing AI-assisted first drafts of core program artifacts, modernizing high-toil workflows into AI-first mechanisms (e.g., intake triage, status synthesis, action/decision extraction, risk & dependency tracking), and synthesizing signals to proactively surface risks, decision/trade-offs, and escalation paths.
Prototype solutions to augment decisions through data (e.g. dashboards, data analysis) or simplify processes (e.g. process and workflow helpers, or internal tools) using AI coding assistants (“vibe coding”).
Follow Pinterest AI guidance for risk, governance, and safety-by-design: appropriately handle sensitive data, validate AI-generated outputs, document assumptions/limits, and ensure AI-assisted workflows meet applicable policy/compliance expectations before broad adoption.