Principal Engineer, Core - Pinner Journeys

We’re looking for a Principal Engineer to set the technical vision and lead foundational work across Homefeed, Search, and our emerging AI Assistant experiences at Pinterest.

This role sits at the intersection of relevance, ranking, retrieval, and generative AI, and will shape how hundreds of millions of Pinners discover and act on inspiration every day.

You will operate as a cross-cutting technical leader: defining long-term architecture, raising the bar on ML and systems excellence, and partnering closely with product and executive leadership to drive step-function improvements in engagement, quality, and creator value.

Responsibilities:

• Define the long-term technical strategy and architecture for Homefeed, Search, and AI Assistant, including retrieval, ranking, personalization, and generative experiences.
• Drive a multi-year roadmap for unifying signals, features, and models across surfaces to deliver a coherent, high-quality discovery experience.
• Lead the design and adoption of large-scale retrieval and ranking systems that materially improve relevance and monetization.
• Architect how LLMs and foundation models integrate with our core discovery stack.
• Set technical direction for experimentation, measurement, and evaluation frameworks.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership on high-leverage projects.
• Partner deeply with Product, Data Science, Research, and Design to frame the right problems and ensure long-term platform health.
• Raise the bar for engineering excellence: reliability, performance, security/privacy, cost efficiency, and operational health of large-scale ML systems.
• Represent Pinterest externally for these domains and help attract and grow top talent.

Requirements:

• 15+ years of industry experience in large-scale systems and/or machine learning.
• Proven experience as a Principal Engineer, Architect, or equivalent senior technical leader.
• Deep expertise in at least two of: large-scale retrieval and ranking, representation learning, search systems, or large language models and generative AI.
• Demonstrated ability to define and drive multi-year architectural transformations at scale.
• Strong product intuition and experience partnering with PM/Design/Data Science.
• Exceptional communication skills.
• Passion for mentoring and growing senior/staff engineers.

Nice to have:

• Prior experience in consumer discovery products at global scale.
• Experience building or integrating AI assistants or agentic workflows into consumer experiences.

Salary: $242,634-$449,541 USD