About this role
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 .
We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to lead the technical direction of the backend systems powering Pinterest's AI-driven product experiences — Pinterest Assistant, visual editing and content creation tools and future LLM-based products. You'll design and ship backend systems while architecting the broader platform strategy that enables these experiences to scale across surfaces and teams. This is a hands-on leadership role where you'll move between deep technical execution, system-level architecture and cross-team technical leadership.
What you'll do:
• Define the backend and platform architecture for AI-driven product experiences — visual-chat, AI image generation and editing, and agentic or LLM-based products — partnering with Engineering, Product, ML and UX leaders to shape the technical vision and roadmap.
• Architect end-to-end systems spanning API layers, orchestration, logging, evaluation, storage and safety controls, ensuring solutions scale across multiple products and teams.
• Lead resolution of complex technical challenges — e.g., scaling LLM inference for real-time features, balancing latency vs. quality in AI-generated content, and standardizing backend capabilities for reuse.
• Design and implement production backend systems including API endpoints, orchestration layers, data models, caching strategies and integrations with Pinterest's LLM infrastructure.
• Use AI to accelerate prototyping, evaluation design and code generation, while applying judgment and verification to ensure correctness and quality.
• Create and evolve shared tooling and evaluation frameworks for LLM-based experiences, including offline eval pipelines, A/B testing hooks, quality metrics and observability.
• Guide the design of projects with significant complexity and ambiguity spanning multiple teams — setting technic