Opportunity at
PinterestSr. Staff Software Engineer, Pinterest Assistant
Pinterest operates a digital platform where global users discover fresh ideas, plan future activities, and locate visual inspiration. The company is currently hiring a Sr. Staff…
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About This Role
Pinterest operates a digital platform where global users discover fresh ideas, plan future activities, and locate visual inspiration. The company is currently hiring a Sr. Staff Software Engineer, Pinterest Assistant to join the Pinterest Assistant team located in Seattle. This full-time role suits an experienced backend engineer who wants to take technical leadership over a visual-first, artificial intelligence-powered companion designed to help users transition smoothly from inspiration to action across…
Job Description
Pinterest operates a digital platform where global users discover fresh ideas, plan future activities, and locate visual inspiration. The company is currently hiring a Sr. Staff Software Engineer, Pinterest Assistant to join the Pinterest Assistant team located in Seattle.
This full-time role suits an experienced backend engineer who wants to take technical leadership over a visual-first, artificial intelligence-powered companion designed to help users transition smoothly from inspiration to action across shopping, search, and discovery. The position requires working on-site for in-person collaboration once per quarter, meaning the candidate can be based anywhere in the country.
As the primary technical lead for the backend platform, the chosen professional will architect multi-modal, conversational experiences that operate at a massive scale. Key duties involve defining core infrastructure components such as orchestration, context management, memory, tool integrations, APIs, and personalization. The individual will collaborate extensively across product, design, frontend, infrastructure, and machine learning departments to shape long-term technical strategy and establish production standards for large language models and agent frameworks.
Responsibilities
- Establish and execute the backend technical vision and architecture for the Pinterest Assistant to ensure reliable scaling for millions of users
- Design and build core platform elements including orchestration, personalization, memory, context management, APIs, backend infrastructure, and tool integrations
- Formulate technical strategies that introduce platform investments, improve developer velocity, and enhance scalability
- Collaborate closely with product, design, frontend, infrastructure, and machine learning teams to deliver multimodal conversational experiences
- Create architectures for model-driven applications covering context assembly, retrieval, tool execution, model orchestration, and memory
- Set engineering standards for production large language model and agent systems, incorporating observability, logging, safety, evaluations, incident response, and rollouts
- Mentor engineering personnel to elevate technical quality across the organization through design reviews and guidance
- Manage ambiguities pragmatically to balance rapid product development with long-term code maintainability
- Influence broader artificial intelligence platform strategies across multiple teams
- Keep pace with ongoing developments in backend architecture, agentic systems, and large language models for consumer product applications
Requirements
- Hold a bachelor degree in computer science or a closely related discipline, or possess equivalent practical experience
- Bring 10 or more years of backend software engineering experience, featuring a background as a senior individual contributor leading complex, ambiguous consumer-facing systems
- Possess 3 or more years acting as a technical lead guiding architecture and development for large-scale distributed backend systems
- Demonstrate strong backend engineering proficiency using Python, TypeScript, Node, or comparable languages and ecosystems
- Show a history of building foundational platforms or infrastructure that accelerates product team output
- Display a solid grasp of modern model-driven systems with a record of partnering alongside machine learning engineers on artificial intelligence products
- Exhibit strong leadership, communication, and cross-functional collaboration abilities
- Understand concepts like retrieval, ranking, orchestration, personalization, context management, or inference
- Display a product-focused, execution-oriented mindset capable of navigating ambiguity and executing both strategy and implementation
- Be able to travel for in-person collaboration once per quarter while working from anywhere in the country
Qualifications
- Experience constructing large-scale artificial intelligence products or large language model applications
- Background designing systems for conversational artificial intelligence, multi-modal experiences, agents, or tool calling
- Practical exposure to search, recommendation, personalization, ranking, or retrieval systems
- Familiarity with context management, embeddings, memory architecture, or retrieval-augmented generation
- Experience cooperating with applied scientists or machine learning engineers to deploy machine learning features into production
- Familiarity with quality frameworks, experimentation, and evaluation setups for artificial intelligence offerings
- Prior full-stack development background
Core Skills
Benefits
- Equity eligibility
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the employment type and location for this role?
This is a full-time position located in Seattle. It follows a hybrid model requiring in-person collaboration once per quarter, allowing the candidate to be situated anywhere in the country.
Does the posting specify a salary for the Sr. Staff Software Engineer position?
Yes, the base salary range for United States-based applicants is $208,592 to $429,454 USD, and the role is also eligible for equity.
Is relocation assistance available for this job?
No, this position is not eligible for relocation assistance.
What kind of experience is required for this position?
Applicants must have a bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent experience, at least 10 years of backend software engineering experience as a senior IC, and 3 or more years operating as a technical lead on large-scale distributed backend systems.
Sample Interview Questions
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