Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Monetization

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.

Within our Ads Performance and Ads Delivery teams, we connect the dots between what Pinners aspire to do and the products our advertising partners offer—building personalized, discovery-driven experiences that help people create a life they love. Pinterest is just over 4,000 employees globally, which means our teams stay small, high-ownership, and fast-moving, with hands-on access to an exceptional vault of data and the chance to build and evolve large-scale recommendation and ranking systems at real-world scale.

We’re hiring multiple Staff Machine Learning Engineers across our Ads Machine Learning org within Monetization Engineering. In this role, you’ll lead innovation across core applied ML and marketplace technologies that power our ads ecosystem—advancing our ads ranking stack, building the next generation of scalable ads retrieval models, and improving shopping discovery for millions of users. You’ll also help shape the evolution of the Pinterest marketplace by designing systems and experiments that improve the ads delivery funnel, inform the utility function, and influence auction mechanisms and ad allocation—using deep analysis of marketplace dynamics to unlock new insights. Overall, this is a high-impact opportunity to define what great looks like for Pinterest Shopping Ads, directly improving both user experience and advertiser outcomes in a uniquely discovery-first marketplace.

What you’ll do:

• Design features and build large-scale machine learning models to improve user ads action prediction with low latency
• Drive innovation in personalized Shopping Ads recommendations through advanced modeling
• Develop new methods for inferring user interests from online and offline activity
• Mine text, visual, user signals to better understand user intention
• Leverage multimodal signals (text, visual, user) to better understand user intent
• Collaborate with product and sales teams to design and implement new ad products
• Partner cross-functionally  with product, sales, data science, and engineering teams to design and improve user journey and optimize ads performance across all stages of retrieval and ranking
• Build and improve backend systems and statistical models that underlay the marketplace to maximize value for Pinners, Partners and Pinterest.
• Define and implement experiments to understand long term Marketplace effects
• Develop strategies to balance long and short term business objectives.
• Drive multi-functional collaboration with peers and partners across the company to improve knowledge of marketplace design and operations.

What we’re looking for:

• Degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics or related field
• Experience building production machine learning systems at scale, data mining, search, recommendations, and/or natural language processing
• Experience leading projects and mentoring team members
• Strong mathematical skills with knowledge of statistical methods
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills and strong cross-functional collaboration
• Background in computational advertising is a plus, but not required
• Nice to have: 
  • Experience using Cursor, Copilot, Codex, or similar AI coding assistants for development, debugging, testing, and refactoring
  • Familiarity with LLM-powered productivity tools for documentation search, experiment analysis, SQL/data exploration, and engineering workflow acceleration

This position is not eligible for relocation assistance.

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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.

US based applicants only

$189,308—$389,753 USD

Our Commitment to Inclusion:

Pinterest is an equal opportunity employer and makes employment decisions on the basis of merit. We want to have the best qualified people in every job. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion or religious creed, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, status as a protected veteran, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information or characteristics (or those of a family member) or any other consideration made unlawful by applicable federal, state or local laws. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you require a medical or religious accommodation during the job application process, please complete this form for support.