Manager II, Machine Learning-Search

Pinterest helps more than 450 million people discover new ideas to help design their life. Our users come to Pinterest to explore ideas and run more than 6 billion search queries every month. Many of these queries represent exploratory search intent and are broad, which means that the search system should be able to deeply understand this intent, and then help people explore content, personalize results, harness visual signals effectively, and show the most engaging content up front. In addition, the team also owns query refinements and modules that help Pinners narrow their search intent from broad exploratory queries, to help them narrow their results down. All of this means that Pinterest search presents a unique challenge quite unlike other search systems and the opportunity to innovate on a product that only Pinterest can build. 

We are looking for an exceptional  technical leader and engineering manager to help lead the search backend team that spans across Palo Alto and Seattle.

What you will do:

• The candidate will be responsible for major areas of the search engine for more than 450 million monthly active Pinterest users, including indexing and document ranking, query and content understanding, personalization, ML based retrieval, shopping, videos, as well as infrastructure efficiency and scalability. In addition, the candidate will work on innovative applications of NLP and Vision Models, and other techniques to drive query recommendations, multimodal search, agentic search, multimodal query understanding, and query based module generation and ranking.
• Work closely with the other engineering teams in Pinterest to bring superior search experience to our users, such as Search Product, Infrastructure, research and content signals.
• Deeply understand the Pinterest search product, and drive the vision for the team.
• Provide visibility for senior leadership into the team’s global impact.
• Partner with stakeholders to expand impact across the company, including product management, data scientists and design. 
• Mentor and grow managers, leaders and engineers on the team.
• Build a culture of excellence and expertise.

What we are looking for:

• Experience leading and working on a large-scale production search, recommendation or ads systems that are based on state-of-the-art machine learning and big data technology.
• Applied machine learning experience is strongly preferred. Experience in related fields such as recommendation systems, natural language processing and computer vision is a bonus.
• Ability to drive the roadmap and directions of scalable production quality systems end-to-end.
• A knack for product and impact on users of a consumer product. 
• 3+ years of experience in leading/managing a highly impactful ML-based engineering team of 5+ size; 7+ years of software development experience.
• Bachelors degree in computer science or related technical field, or equivalent experience
• Experience using Cursor, Copilot, Codex, or similar AI coding assistants for development, debugging, testing, and refactoring.
• Familiarity with LLM-powered productivity tools for documentation search, experiment analysis, SQL/data exploration, and engineering workflow acceleration.

In-Office Requirement Statement:

• We let the type of work you do guide the collaboration style. That means we're not always working in an office, but we continue to gather for key moments of collaboration and connection.

Relocation Statement:

• This position is not eligible for relocation assistance. Visit our PinFlex page to learn more about our working model.

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