Principal Software Engineer, Pinterest

Ads Infrastructure

$227.3-468k

+ Equity

Python
Java
C++
MySQL
Spark
CUDA
PyTorch
Flink
Expert level
San Francisco Bay Area

More information about location

Office located in Palo Alto, CA

Pinterest

Visual bookmarking tool for saving & discovering creative ideas

Open for applications

Pinterest

Visual bookmarking tool for saving & discovering creative ideas

1001+ employees

B2BLifestyleSocialDigital MediaSocial MediaAdvertising

Open for applications

$227.3-468k

+ Equity

Python
Java
C++
MySQL
Spark
CUDA
PyTorch
Flink
Expert level
San Francisco Bay Area

More information about location

Office located in Palo Alto, CA

1001+ employees

B2BLifestyleSocialDigital MediaSocial MediaAdvertising

Company mission

To bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love.

Role

Who you are

  • 10+ years of relevant industry experience with distributed systems, transactional datastores, and systems programming
  • Experience in building and owning large scale high performance infrastructure powering ads, recommendation, search, or other consumer facing applications
  • Experience solving end-user problems and envisioning solutions to improve their productivity
  • Proficiency in Java, C++, or Python

What the job involves

  • We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to initiate, design, and build the next-gen version of the key infra components in our monetization ecosystem, such as modernizing our end-to-end ML platform serving over hundreds of use cases making billions of predictions per second
  • Redesigning our catalog ingestion and ads delivery systems to become one of the leading advertising platforms in the world
  • This role is exciting, because not only will you be able to lean on your deep infra knowledge to redesign systems at a very large scale, but also have the opportunity to work with very experienced engineers and cross-functional partners to solve problems that impact the topline and/or bottomline of our business
  • Re-architect core catalog, ads indexing and serving infrastructure to achieve greater scalability, freshness, performance, and reliability, using data storage, streaming processing, and information retrieval technologies such as MySQL, TiDB, Flink, and HNSW
  • Modernize the ML ecosystem for the entire Pinterest Ads product, replacing a hodgepodge of out-of-date ML stack with a unified, modern, and privacy-first ML stack with Pytorch, Spark, Iceberg, and GPU based serving
  • Collaborate with cross-functional teams to define problems and drive solutions
  • Work with a strong team of engineers and provide technical guidance and mentorship

Our take

Inspiration and ideas can pop into your head at any time, and with the growth of social media and networking, sharing these interests and gaining exposure has never been easier. Pinterest exists to display these moments visually, as a kind of digital pinboard allowing users to save and share digital images which have inspired them.

Pinterest's emphasis on visual discovery has differentiated it from competitors and created a more positive and fulfilling experience for its users. Pinterest in many ways provides a respite from the ceaseless negativity that plagues social media such as Facebook and Twitter, and this is perhaps responsible for its userbase expanding to 450 million users in 2022, driven by uptake mostly outside of North America.

Pinterest has not been immune to woes affecting the global tech sector and made about 5% of its workforce redundant at the end of 2022 and the start of 2023. Having restructured to face a challenging climate, it is well-positioned to resume its growth, which has increased consistently year on year. Its immediate goals are to continue to grow its user base and expand the uptake of its short video product, which it aims to monetize.

Kirsty headshot

Kirsty

Company Specialist

Insights

Few candidates hear
back within 2 weeks

9% employee growth in 12 months

Company

Company HQ

SoMa, San Francisco, CA

Founders

Worked as a Product Specialist at Google for 2 years before leaving to work on his own apps, which led to founding Pinterest


People progressing

Joined as Marketing Lead, promoted to Head of Growth Ops for English-speaking markets after 3 years. They've have since been promoted to Global Head of Editorial, a position they started in 2022.

Salary benchmarks

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