About Pinterest:
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.
Millions of people across the world come to Pinterest to find new ideas every day. It’s where they get inspiration, dream about new possibilities and plan for what matters most. Our mission is to help those people find their inspiration and create a life they love.
We are looking for a Director of Engineering to lead the strategic vision and execution for Pinterest’s core and ads serving platforms, overseeing the infrastructure that enables high-scale, low-latency delivery of content and ads across all Pinterest surfaces. They will define the multi-year architecture to ensure our serving systems are reliable, performant, and cost-efficient while enabling rapid innovation for product and ML teams.
What you’ll do:
- Set the long-term technical and operational vision for the Core and Ads Serving Platform, aligning infrastructure investments with business strategy.
- Lead a high-performing organization of engineers and managers, fostering a culture of innovation, technical excellence, and rapid delivery.
- Partner with senior leaders in Product, ML, and Infra to define priorities, resolve tradeoffs, and ensure our systems support our strategic goals for revenue, engagement, and safety.
- Drive initiatives to modernize our serving stack, improving reliability, latency, and cost-efficiency while enabling faster iteration for product teams.
- Establish clear metrics for platform success (e.g., latency, availability, cost-per-impression) and hold the organization accountable for delivering on these targets.
- Use AI to accelerate platform analysis, design iteration, system debugging, and documentation synthesis, enabling the organization to make better decisions faster while maintaining high standards for accuracy.
What we’re looking for:
- 5+ years of Experience leading or managing big engineering organizations, including setting direction, driving execution, and supporting team members’ growth.
- 8+ years of relevant industry experience
- Extensive experience leading engineering organizations responsible for large-scale serving or delivery infrastructure, with a deep understanding of distributed systems and performance tradeoffs.
- Proven ability to translate business goals into technical roadmaps and deliver on complex, multi-year initiatives.
- Exceptional leadership skills: you develop leaders, foster inclusivity, and maintain a high-trust, high-accountability environment.
- Demonstrated experience using AI/LLM-powered tooling to improve engineering velocity and quality, with a sound approach to validating outputs.
- Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills; ability to influence senior cross-functional partners and articulate technical trade-offs to non-technical audiences.
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
We recognize that the ideal environment for work is situational and may differ across departments. What this looks like day-to-day can vary based on the needs of each organization or role.
This role will need to be in the office for in-person collaboration 1-2 times per quarter and therefore needs to be in a commutable distance from one of the following offices: PA or SF offices.
This position is not eligible for relocation assistance. Visit our PinFlex page to learn more about our working model.
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At Pinterest we believe the workplace should be equitable, inclusive, and inspiring for every employee. In an effort to provide greater transparency, we are sharing the base salary range for this position. The position is also eligible for equity. Final salary is based on a number of factors including location, travel, relevant prior experience, or particular skills and expertise.
Information regarding the culture at Pinterest and benefits available for this position can be found here.
Our Commitment to Inclusion:
Skills Required
- Deep expertise building and evolving large-scale indexing, search, recommendation, or ads retrieval systems
- Experience with real-time and incremental architectures for retrieval and indexing
- Strong technical leadership operating across multiple teams or organizations
- Proven ability to lead large modernization efforts, migrations, and platform rollouts at scale
- Exceptional systems thinking and problem-solving connecting platform design to product, ML, operations, and business outcomes
- Strong communication skills for technical and non-technical audiences
- Demonstrated experience using AI to improve engineering workflows (analysis, prototyping, documentation)
- Track record of critically evaluating and validating AI-assisted work through testing and peer review
- High integrity and care handling sensitive data and production-critical systems
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, related field, or equivalent experience
- Ability to mentor senior engineers and foster inclusive collaboration and operational excellence
- US based applicants only; commutable to PA or SF offices for occasional in-person collaboration
Pinterest Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Pinterest and has not been reviewed or approved by Pinterest.
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Fair & Transparent Compensation — Compensation is considered competitive in core technical roles, with clearly defined base, bonus, and RSU components. Vesting schedules and pay elements are articulated clearly, supporting visibility into total rewards.
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Parental & Family Support — Policies include substantial paid parental leave globally alongside fertility and family‑building benefits, adoption assistance, and dedicated caregiver supports. Communications also highlight a phased return‑to‑work approach.
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Flexible Benefits — PinFlex enables role‑dependent hybrid/remote work with home‑office, connectivity, and commuter support, plus the option to work internationally for a limited period with approval. Time away is reinforced by a paid company shutdown and generous vacation framing.
Pinterest Insights
What We Do
Pinterest is the visual inspiration platform people around the world use to shop products personalized to their taste, find ideas to do offline and discover the most inspiring creators. Today, more than 460 million people come to the platform every month to explore and experience billions of ideas that have been saved. We’re proud to help people to discover and do what they love.
