TL;DR
Manager II, Machine Learning-Search at Pinterest leading the search backend team. Responsible for indexing, ranking, query understanding, personalization, and ML-based retrieval systems serving 450M+ monthly active users. Will mentor engineers and drive innovation in NLP, vision models, and agentic search.
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.
Pinterest helps more than 450 million people discover new ideas to help design their life. Our users come to Pinterest to explore ideas and run more than 6 billion search queries every month. Many of these queries represent exploratory search intent and are broad, which means that the search system should be able to deeply understand this intent, and then help people explore content, personalize results, harness visual signals effectively, and show the most engaging content up front. In addition, the team also owns query refinements and modules that help Pinners narrow their search intent from broad exploratory queries, to help them narrow their results down. All of this means that Pinterest search presents a unique challenge quite unlike other search systems and the opportunity to innovate on a product that only Pinterest can build.
We are looking for an exceptional technical leader and engineering manager to help lead the search backend team that spans across Palo Alto and Seattle.
What you will do:
- The candidate will be responsible for major areas of the search engine for more than 450 million monthly active Pinterest users, including indexing and document ranking, query and content understanding, personalization, ML based retrieval, shopping, videos, as well as infrastructure efficiency and scalability. In addition, the candidate will work on innovative applications of NLP and Vision Models, and other techniques to drive query recommendations, multimodal search, agentic search, multimodal query understanding, and query based module generation and ranking.
- Work closely with the other engineering teams in Pinterest to bring superior search experience to our users, such as Search Product, Infrastructure, research and content signals.
- Deeply understand the Pinterest search product, and drive the vision for the team.
- Provide visibility for senior leadership into the team’s global impact.
- Partner with stakeholders to expand impact across the company, including product management, data scientists and design.
- Mentor and grow managers, leaders and engineers on the team.
- Build a culture of excellence and expertise.
What we are looking for:
- Experience leading and working on a large-scale production search, recommendation or ads systems that are based on state-of-the-art machine learning and big data technology.
- Applied machine learning experience is strongly preferred. Experience in related fields such as recommendation systems, natural language processing and computer vision is a bonus.
- Ability to drive the roadmap and directions of scalable production quality systems end-to-end.
- A knack for product and impact on users of a consumer product.
- 3+ years of experience in leading/managing a highly impactful ML-based engineering team of 5+ size; 7+ years of software development experience.
- Bachelors degree in computer science or related technical field, or equivalent experience
- 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.
In-Office Requirement Statement:
- We let the type of work you do guide the collaboration style. That means we're not always working in an office, but we continue to gather for key moments of collaboration and connection.
Relocation Statement:
- This position is not eligible for relocation assistance. Visit our PinFlex page to learn more about our working model.
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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.