Staff Software Engineer

Who you are

• 8+ years of software engineering experience building and operating production backend or distributed systems
• Experience leading complex technical initiatives across teams or organizations
• Strong expertise in distributed systems, online serving, low-latency services, or infrastructure platforms
• Demonstrated ability to make sound tradeoffs across latency, reliability, scalability, cost, and developer experience
• Strong communication and collaboration skills with technical and cross-functional partners
• Proficiency in one or more programming languages such as Java, C++, Go, or Python
• Experience mentoring engineers and elevating technical standards
• Demonstrated ability to use AI to improve the speed and quality of day-to-day engineering workflows, with a rigorous approach to testing, validation, and responsible use
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related technical field, or equivalent experience
• Preferred qualifications:
• Experience with ads delivery, recommendation or search serving, retrieval, ranking, or experimentation systems
• Experience with serving-framework migrations, platform consolidation, or developer tooling
• Experience with observability, production debugging, traffic management, or incident response

What the job involves

• Pinterest is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to help evolve the serving platforms that power Ads and Core experiences. You will lead large-scale, low-latency distributed-system initiatives that make our serving stack more performant, reliable, observable, and easier to extend
• You will work across Ads and Core engineering teams to define durable platform capabilities, modernize frameworks, and unlock faster product iteration with high confidence in production
• Set technical direction and lead architecture for major serving-platform initiatives across Ads and Core
• Build and operate scalable, highly available systems with clear performance, reliability, and efficiency goals
• Partner with product, ML, infrastructure, and Core/Ads engineering teams to translate complex requirements into reusable platform capabilities
• Improve the serving stack through framework modernization, API evolution, experimentation controls, observability, and debugging tools
• Lead complex projects end to end: technical strategy, design, implementation, rollout, adoption, and operational readiness
• Use AI to accelerate analysis, debugging, design exploration, and iteration while applying sound engineering judgment and validation
• Raise the quality bar through design reviews, code reviews, documentation, and operational excellence
• Mentor engineers and scale technical leadership across the organization