Description
At Pinterest, AI isn't just a feature, it's a powerful partner that augments our creativity and amplifies our impact. We're looking for a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to advance how we develop machine learning capabilities through agentic AI.
Your primary focus will be Reflex, our effort to automate and accelerate recommendation research and development. You will own a major technical area, building agents that investigate opportunities, implement changes, run experiments, and learn from their results.
Responsibilities:
- Own and advance a major technical area in automated recommendation research within Reflex, collaborating with other technical leads and partner teams.
- Build LLM agents that connect hypothesis generation, implementation, experiment execution, evaluation, and learning from previous results.
- Develop rigorous evaluations for agent behavior and research outputs, and use them to improve quality, reliability, and efficiency.
- Contribute to generative retrieval models, particularly Semantic ID learning, evaluation, and integration into production recommendation systems.
- Take promising ideas from research and prototypes through offline evaluation, online experimentation, and production launches.
- Build reliable integrations with ML development infrastructure and make informed tradeoffs across model quality, iteration speed, compute cost, and operational complexity.
- Raise technical quality through hands-on implementation, design, and code reviews, documentation, and mentorship.
- Work with research, recommendation, and ML infrastructure teams to shape technical approaches, resolve dependencies, and support adoption.
- Identify and apply relevant advances from research, and contribute new methods where existing approaches fall short.
Requirements:
- Bachelor's in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- Minimum 8 years of experience building and shipping ML or AI systems, including substantial hands-on engineering and technical leadership.
- Demonstrated experience building LLM agents or other agentic AI systems for complex tasks, with a clear approach to evaluating and improving their performance.
- Strong ML fundamentals and depth in one or more relevant areas, such as applied LLMs, representation learning, recommendation systems, retrieval, or ML systems.
- Experience taking research ideas into reliable production systems and evaluating their impact through meaningful experiments.
- Strong software engineering skills, including the ability to design maintainable systems, implement difficult components, and conduct thorough technical reviews.
- Experience leading a substantial technical area, making decisions under ambiguity, and collaborating effectively across teams.
- A track record of mentoring engineers and raising the quality of a team's technical work.
- Clear written and verbal communication, including the ability to explain technical tradeoffs to different audiences.
- A disciplined approach to using AI in your own work, including verification of generated code, analysis, and conclusions.
Benefits:
- Salary range: $189,308-$389,753 USD
- Equity eligibility
- Flexible working model
- Opportunities for growth and development