Sr. Staff Software Engineer, Assistant

Salary: $208,592 - 429,454 per year Requirements:

• We require a bachelors degree in computer science or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• We expect 10+ years of backend engineering experience, including substantial ownership of large, ambiguous consumer-facing systems as a senior individual contributor.
• We need at least 3 years in a technical lead capacity, guiding architecture and delivery of large-scale distributed backend platforms.
• We look for strong backend development expertise in Python, TypeScript, Node, or comparable languages and ecosystems.
• We value experience building platforms or core infrastructure that helps product teams ship faster.
• We seek a strong understanding of modern model-driven systems and experience partnering closely with machine learning engineers on AI-enabled products.
• We need excellent leadership, communication, and cross-functional collaboration abilities.
• We look for familiarity with concepts such as retrieval, ranking, personalization, inference, context management, or orchestration, along with the ability to contribute effectively to technical design.
• We want a proven record of mentoring senior engineers and lifting engineering quality across an organization.
• We prefer a product-minded, execution-focused approach with the ability to lead through ambiguity and move between strategy and hands-on implementation.
• We value a builders mindset: the ability to create momentum in uncertain areas, make practical early decisions, and establish the technical foundation for systems that can grow in scale, complexity, and influence.
• Nice to have: experience building AI-powered or LLM-based products at scale.
• Nice to have: experience designing conversational AI, agentic systems, tool calling, or multimodal experiences.
• Nice to have: experience with retrieval, ranking, recommendation, search, or personalization systems.
• Nice to have: familiarity with embeddings, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), context management, or memory architecture.
• Nice to have: experience partnering with Applied Scientists or Machine Learning engineers to bring ML capabilities into production.
• Nice to have: familiarity with evaluation frameworks, experimentation, and quality frameworks for AI products.
• Nice to have: full-stack development experience.

• We will rely on you to define and steer the technical vision and architecture for the backend systems behind Pinterest Assistant, ensuring reliable scale for millions of users.
• We will expect you to lead the design and implementation of the core Assistant platform, including orchestration, memory and personalization, context management, APIs, tool integrations, and backend infrastructure.
• You will drive technical strategy by identifying foundational platform investments that unlock new capabilities while improving developer productivity, reliability, and scalability.
• You will partner closely with Product, Design, Frontend, ML, and Infrastructure teams to deliver a deeply personalized, multimodal conversational experience.
• You will help shape the architecture for AI-powered applications, including retrieval, context assembly, tool execution, memory, and model orchestration, in collaboration with ML teams.
• You will establish engineering best practices for production LLM and agent systems, covering observability, logging, evaluations, safety controls, rollout planning, and incident response.
• You will mentor engineers through architecture reviews, technical direction, and thoughtful engineering leadership.
• You will make pragmatic architectural decisions that balance rapid iteration with long-term maintainability.
• You will influence technical direction beyond the immediate team by collaborating across organizations and helping shape our broader AI platform strategy.
• You will stay current with advances in LLMs, agentic systems, and backend platform design, applying them pragmatically to consumer product development.

• AI
• Backend
• Frontend
• LLM
• Machine Learning
• Python
• RAG
• TypeScript
• NodeJS
• Support

More:

We are Pinterest, a platform where millions of people come to discover creative ideas, explore new possibilities, and plan meaningful moments. We are hiring a Sr. Staff Backend Engineer to join our Pinterest Assistant team, where we are building a visual-first, AI-powered companion that helps Pinners move from inspiration to action across shopping, search, and discovery. This is a remote-friendly role anywhere in the country, with in-office collaboration required once per quarter. The position is not eligible for relocation assistance. We offer equity, a competitive US base salary range of $208,592 to $429,454, and a workplace culture focused on equity, inclusion, and inspiration.

last updated 33 week of 2026