Sr. Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Content Ecosystem

About Pinterest: Millions of people around the world come to our platform to find creative ideas, dream about new possibilities and plan for memories that will last a lifetime. At Pinterest, we’re on a mission to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love, and that starts with the people behind the product. Discover a career where you ignite innovation for millions, transform passion into growth opportunities, celebrate each other’s unique experiences and embrace the flexibility to do your best work. Creating a career you love? It’s Possible. At Pinterest, AI isn't just a feature, it's a powerful partner that augments our creativity and amplifies our impact, and we’re looking for candidates who are excited to be a part of that. To get a complete picture of your experience and abilities, we’ll explore your foundational skills and how you collaborate with AI. Through our interview process, what matters most is that you can always explain your approach, showing us not just what you know, but how you think. You can read more about our AI interview philosophy and how we use AI in our recruiting process here . Pinterest works when the content ecosystem works: when people can reliably find ideas that feel inspiring, trustworthy, and actionable—and when the ecosystem continuously learns what to create, surface, and sustain next. In this Sr. Staff ML Engineer role, you’ll be the technical lead shaping how Pinterest understands and improves its content as a living marketplace: a dynamic system with feedback loops between users, creators/publishers, distribution, and long-term business outcomes. You will define a durable ML strategy that goes beyond “engagement metrics” to improve overall ecosystem health—identifying where we’re underserving content, uncovering the attributes that make content succeed, and designing optimization approaches that balance relevance, quality, diversity, integrity, and monetization. The problems are inherently multi-objective and long-horizon: the best decisions today should strengthen the ecosystem tomorrow. If you’re excited by high-leverage technical leadership, rigorous ML thinking, and marketplace-style dynamics at scale, this role offers a chance to directly shape Pinterest’s moat and the experience millions of people come to for ideas they can act on. What you’ll do: Set technical strategy and vision for ML systems that improve the end-to-end content ecosystem, including supply, distribution, and engagement/utility outcomes. Partner with DS teams to develop a content ecosystem measurement framework to quantify content health and performance (e.g., content quality, freshness, diversity, coverage, creator/content sustainability, and user value), and align it with company/business goals. Identify and close content gaps by building models and insights that answer: what content is missing, for whom, in which contexts, and why. Deeply understand what content works and why by combining causal thinking, experimentation, and model interpretability to connect content attributes and distribution mechanisms to downstream user and business outcomes. Build and optimize content marketplace mechanisms that balance multi-sided incentives and constraints (e.g., users, creators/publishers, advertisers, internal policy/safety), while maximizing long-term ecosystem value. Design multi-objective optimization approaches that manage tradeoffs across relevance, quality, diversity, creator incentives, integrity/safety, and monetization. Partner closely with cross-functional teams (Product, Data Science, UX Research, Content/Creator teams, Trust & Safety, Ads, Infra) to translate ambiguous ecosystem problems into clear technical roadmaps and deliver measurable impact. Mentor and grow junior ML engineers through technical coaching, design reviews, career development support, and creating a culture of strong engineering and scientific rigor. Raise the quality bar for ML engineering by establishing best practices for