Staff Software Engineer, Ads & Core Serving Platform

Role Overview

Pinterest is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to help evolve the serving platforms that power Ads and Core experiences. You will lead large-scale, low-latency distributed-system initiatives that make our serving stack more performant, reliable, observable, and easier to extend.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction and lead architecture for major serving-platform initiatives across Ads and Core.
• Build and operate scalable, highly available systems with clear performance, reliability, and efficiency goals.
• Partner with product, ML, infrastructure, and Core/Ads engineering teams to translate complex requirements into reusable platform capabilities.
• Improve the serving stack through framework modernization, API evolution, experimentation controls, observability, and debugging tools.
• Lead complex projects end to end: technical strategy, design, implementation, rollout, adoption, and operational readiness.
• Use AI to accelerate analysis, debugging, design exploration, and iteration while applying sound engineering judgment and validation.
• Raise the quality bar through design reviews, code reviews, documentation, and operational excellence.
• Mentor engineers and scale technical leadership across the organization.

Requirements

• 8+ years of software engineering experience building and operating production backend or distributed systems.
• Experience leading complex technical initiatives across teams or organizations.
• Strong expertise in distributed systems, online serving, low-latency services, or infrastructure platforms.
• Demonstrated ability to make sound tradeoffs across latency, reliability, scalability, cost, and developer experience.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills with technical and cross-functional partners.
• Proficiency in one or more programming languages such as Java, C++, Go, or Python.
• Experience mentoring engineers and elevating technical standards.
• Demonstrated ability to use AI to improve the speed and quality of day-to-day engineering workflows, with a rigorous approach to testing, validation, and responsible use.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related technical field, or equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with ads delivery, recommendation or search serving, retrieval, ranking, or experimentation systems.
• Experience with serving-framework migrations, platform consolidation, or developer tooling.
• Experience with observability, production debugging, traffic management, or incident response.