PhD University Grad Machine Learning Engineer (USA)

About the Role

With more than 640 million users around the world and 300 billion ideas saved, Pinterest Machine Learning engineers help build personalized experiences to help Pinners create a life they love. At Pinterest, you’ll experience hands-on access to an incredible vault of data and contribute to large-scale recommendation systems in ways you won’t find anywhere else.

This is a general posting for multiple roles open across various ML teams. You will have the opportunity to work on a very large scope of problems in recommender systems, search, ads, ranking, natural language processing, graph representation learning, personalization, etc.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to cutting-edge research in machine learning and artificial intelligence that can be applied to Pinterest problems.
• Collect, analyze, and synthesize findings from data and build intelligent data-driven models.
• Write clean, efficient, and sustainable code.
• Use machine learning, natural language processing, and graph analysis to solve modeling and ranking problems across discovery, ads, and search.
• Design, build, and test models to predict engagement for notifications (push, emails, in-app notifications).
• Build content recommendation systems to power push, email, and in-app notifications.
• Work on state-of-the-art large-scale applied machine learning projects.
• Scope and independently solve moderately complex problems.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science, ML, NLP, Statistics, Information Sciences, or a related field required.
• Machine learning experience (ranking, computer vision, NLP, content recommendations, embedding, information retrieval, etc.).
• Experience with big data technologies (e.g., Hadoop/Spark) and scalable real-time systems that process stream data.
• Mastery of at least one systems language (Java, C++, Python) or one ML framework (TensorFlow, PyTorch, MLflow).
• Proficiency with AI-native engineering, including the design of agent-friendly codebases.
• High degree of autonomy in learning new agent-first development tools.
• Strong critical thinking when working with AI-generated suggestions, with a clear approach to validating correctness, performance, security, and maintainability.
• Comfort iterating on prompts, refining workflows, and adapting AI-assisted approaches based on context and constraints.
• Experience in research and in solving analytical problems.
• Strong communicator and team player, able to find solutions for open-ended problems.

Preferred Qualifications

• Publications in machine learning, AI, data science, data analytics, statistics, or related technical fields.
• Interest in research and in applying ML to impactful real-world problems on the Pinterest product.

In-Office Requirement

• Work type guides collaboration style: not always in an office, but gathering for key moments of collaboration and connection.
• May require being located within commutable distance of a Pinterest office for in-person collaboration.