Sr. Staff Machine Learning Engineer
Job Summary
This role involves leading machine learning projects related to search, recommendation, and personalization at Pinterest. The candidate will focus on developing and applying advanced NLP, information retrieval, and generative AI techniques to improve search relevance, query understanding, and content ranking. Leadership in large-scale recommendation and search systems, as well as mentoring junior engineers, is essential. The position emphasizes innovation, collaboration, and impact on user experience within a flexible, inclusive environment.
Required Skills
Benefits
Job Description
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.
Pinterest helps more than 500 million people discover new ideas to help design their life. Our users come to Pinterest to explore ideas and run more than 8 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 senior staff machine learning engineer lead to drive and work on Search-related problems such as engagement and relevance modeling, query understanding, learned retrieval, and other NLP/rec-sys areas on Search - as well as modernizing our stack by leveraging LLMs and generative approaches for retrieval, ranking and query recommendations.
What you will do:
- The candidate will be responsible for leading the machine learning strategy and projects in Pinterest search, including indexing and document ranking, query and content understanding, personalization, ML based retrieval, shopping, videos. In addition, the candidate will work on innovative applications of LLMs, NLP and other techniques to drive query recommendations, autocompletions, 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 content signal, research and infrastructure.
- Bring cutting-edge research and industry knowledge into the team around NLP, information retrieval, machine learning, generative AI and related areas
- Mentor and grow junior engineers on the team.
What we are looking for:
- 8+ years of 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 and expertise and experience in generative technologies is strongly preferred.
- Tech-leadership experience in substantially, internet-scale complex recommendation problems with ability to form and drive roadmaps
- A knack for product and impact on users of a consumer product.
- Bachelor’s/Master’s degree in a relevant field such as computer science or equivalent experience
Relocation Statement:
- This position is not eligible for relocation assistance. Visit our PinFlex page to learn more about our working model.
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.
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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.
Our Commitment to Inclusion:
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