Director, Machine Learning Engineering – Content & User Understanding

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 freedom 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.

What you’ll do:

• Lead ML Strategy and Innovation for Foundational Content and User Understanding
  • Set the multi-year vision, technical strategy, and investment roadmap for content and user understanding ML models and systems.
  • Drive innovation of cutting-edge AI approaches, including large scale sequence modeling, VLM and LLM.
• Lead Execution and Deployment Across Pinterest to Deliver Topline Impact
  • Ensure the foundational content and user understanding models and systems are effective and scalable to power downstream applications across Pinterest surfaces: homefeed, related, search, shopping, growth and ads.
  • Collaborate with Product, Engineering, and Data Science leaders in partner teams to translate foundational ML techniques into significant business impact. Form strong collaboration across teams and build trust.
• Build and Scale a World-Class ML Organization
  • Manage, hire, and develop a team of high-performing managers and ML / Backend engineers, fostering a culture of innovation, technical excellence, rigor, and impact.
• Drive ML Influence Across Pinterest
  • Act as the primary technical spokesperson for Content and User Understanding to executive leadership and external partners.
  • Represent the team's needs and priorities in company-wide planning and resource allocation to ensure long-term, strategic ML investment.

What we’re looking for:

• 12+ years of professional experience as a technical leader, including 5+ years in people leadership roles (managing managers and senior ICs).
• Technical degree in a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Deep ML expertise: building and operating large-scale ML systems in recommendation, ads or search.
• Expertise in