Distinguished Engineer

Remote Hybrid

Quick summary

Work type: Remote
Location: Seattle, WA
Salary: $280,148–$576,774 / yr
Posted: 3 days ago
Nearby: 99+ roles within 25 mi

Market check

Salary context

Above market

How this pay compares to similar roles

Similar $175k

This role $428k

$79k most similar roles pay here $630k

This role pays more than 99% of similar roles. Most pay $136,382–$214,383 — the shaded band above. At the midpoint, this role pays about $428k versus about $175k for comparable roles.

Based on 240 similar postings.

Employer

About Pinterest

Pinterest is a visual discovery and inspiration platform where people find ideas for home, style, recipes, and more. It serves hundreds of millions of users worldwide through its image and video pinboard product.

Pinterest currently has 35 open roles on FindRole.

Listed pay typically runs $171,467–$339,078 across 35 roles with salary data.

Most-posted roles

View all roles at Pinterest

At a glance

TL;DR · Distinguished Engineer

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As a Distinguished Engineer at Pinterest, you will lead foundational work across Homefeed, Search, and the AI Assistant, setting technical vision for retrieval, ranking, personalization, and generative experiences. You’ll define long-term architecture, drive multi-year roadmaps to unify signals and models, and architect large-scale systems integrating LLMs with core discovery features. Key responsibilities include hands-on design of critical components, mentoring senior engineers, and external representation through talks and publications. Ideal candidates have 15+ years of experience in large-scale systems or machine learning, deep expertise in retrieval and ranking, search systems, or generative AI, and a track record of driving technical strategy across organizations. Experience with consumer discovery products at global scale is preferred.

Skills

Python Java Scala Kubernetes AWS Azure GCP Docker CI/CD Prometheus PostgreSQL Redis Elasticsearch GraphQL MLflow TensorFlow PyTorch Hadoop Spark Kafka Snowflake GitLab Jenkins

What you'll do

Define long-term technical strategy and architecture for Homefeed, Search, and AI Assistant.
Lead design of large-scale retrieval and ranking systems to improve relevance and monetization.
Set technical direction for experimentation frameworks in discovery and generative use cases.
Provide hands-on leadership on high-leverage projects, mentoring senior engineers.
Partner with Product, Data Science, Research, and Design to translate product bets into robust plans.
Raise the bar for engineering excellence in reliability, performance, security, and cost efficiency.

What we're looking for

15+ years of industry experience in large-scale systems and machine learning.
Proven track record as a Distinguished Engineer or equivalent senior technical leader.
Deep expertise in large-scale retrieval and ranking, representation learning, and search systems.
Demonstrated ability to drive multi-year architectural transformations at scale.
Strong product intuition with experience partnering on ambiguous product bets.
Exceptional communication skills for articulating strategy and direction.

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