Staff Machine Learning Engineer

Pinterest

Confirmed live 2 days ago High trust
Remote

Quick summary

Work type
Remote
Location
San Francisco, CA
Salary
$189,308–$389,753 / yr
Posted
4 days ago
Freshness
Confirmed live 2 days ago

Market check

Salary context

Above market

How this pay compares to similar roles

Similar $229k
This role $290k
$160k $414k
below market most similar roles pay here above market

This role pays more than 91% of similar roles. Most pay $202,800–$254,750 — the blue band above. At the midpoint, this role pays about $290k versus about $229k 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 79 open roles on FindRole.

Listed pay typically runs $177,185–$339,078 across 73 roles with salary data.

Most-posted roles

View all roles at Pinterest

At a glance

TL;DR · Staff Machine Learning Engineer

Staff Machine Learning Engineer joins the Growth Content Science team to build machine learning systems that determine which content appears on growth surfaces, specifically focusing on notifications. In this role, you will personally build complex models and systems for candidate retrieval, L1 and L2 ranking, utility, blending, and copy generation. You will lead technical sub-areas, drive model improvements through AB test driven innovation loops, and own the health of the ML ecosystem, including training pipelines and serving infrastructure. Required expertise includes recommender modeling, sequence modeling of user behavior with transformer architectures, DNN rankers, and generative or LLM-native recommenders. You must possess experience in high-QPS, latency-constrained ML systems, industry-grade software engineering, and content personalization for cold-start or low-signal users.

What does a Machine Learning Engineer earn in California?

Median $231575 from 194 postings across 35 companies.

See salary data

What you'll do

  • Lead multiple technical sub-areas within Growth content science and define technical roadmaps.
  • Drive ML model improvements through an A/B test driven innovation loop from ideation to production.
  • Own the health of the ML ecosystem including training pipelines, feature infrastructure, and monitoring.
  • Build and ship complex models for real-time, high-QPS, and latency-constrained recommender systems.
  • Identify and apply state-of-the-art techniques from recent research to production systems.
  • Raise the technical excellence bar through mentorship, code reviews, and setting engineering standards.
  • Optimize work processes by building and using cutting-edge AI tools.

What we're looking for

  • Graduate degree in Computer Science or a related field.
  • Minimum of 8 years of experience in machine learning engineering.
  • Experience building and shipping models for large-scale, real-time, end-user production recommender systems.
  • Expertise in recommender modeling, including transformer architectures, DNN rankers, and generative or LLM-native recommenders.
  • Experience building and operating high-QPS, latency-constrained ML systems and infrastructure.
  • Experience in industry-grade software engineering and conducting thorough code and design reviews.
  • Experience in leading technical work across teams and mentoring junior engineers.
  • Strong track record of publications and patents (preferred).

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