---
title: 'Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Content Visual AI at Pinterest'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/staff-machine-learning-engineer-content-visual-ai-pinterest-san-francisco-gdpr9sbj028a'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-19'
---

# Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Content Visual AI at Pinterest

- **Company:** Pinterest
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA / New York, NY / Seattle, WA / United States
- **Compensation:** $189k–$390k
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-10-08
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-19
- **Apply:** https://www.pinterestcareers.com/jobs/?gh_jid=8247246

## Job description

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](https://www.pinterestcareers.com/our-life/pinflex/) 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](https://www.pinterestcareers.com/our-philosophy-on-ai-in-hiring/).

The User and Content Foundations org is responsible for deeply understanding our content, users and their interactions by generating high-quality, reusable signals and insights that power relevance and personalization across the platform. We work at the intersection of distributed machine learning, large multimodal models, data infrastructure, and product adoption to build foundational capabilities that support our partners, including Discovery, Search, Growth, and Ads. We are looking for an experienced Staff Machine Learning Engineer / Technical Lead who can drive the team’s technical direction, lead the team in building scalable content understanding systems, and make an impact on core Pinterest user and business outcomes.  In this role, you will lead ambiguous, high-impact scientific and engineering efforts that create reusable representations, models, and signals.  You’ll work across research, machine learning, infrastructure, and engineering domains to turn advances in VLMs, LLMs, multimodal learning and sequence modeling into impact.  This role is ideal for a deeply technical leader who combines strong ML judgment with product intuition. Expertise in visual representation learning and content understanding is especially valuable; experience with user understanding, recommender systems and LLMs is also highly relevant.

What will you be doing:

- Set the technical direction and multi-quarter strategy for foundational ML capabilities across visual representation learning, multimodal content understanding, and LLM-based personalization.
- Lead high-impact scientific and technical initiatives from problem definition and research strategy through experimentation, productionization, and adoption.
- Build reusable embeddings, representations, semantic signals, and ML infrastructure while advancing techniques such as VLMs, LLMs, sequence modeling, self-supervised learning, retrieval, and distillation.
- Partner with Product, Data Science, Applied Science, and Engineering to translate foundational capabilities into product outcomes and influence cross-functional roadmaps and investments.
- Establish rigorous practices for modeling, data pipelines, distributed training, inference, evaluation, experimentation, and operational excellence while mentoring engineers and scientists.

What we’re looking for:

- Minimum 7 years of industry experience, including 2+ years of tech leading teams
- MS or PhD degree in computer science, machine learning, or equivalent industry experience.
- Publications at top machine learning, multimodal and/or data mining conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, ECCV, ACL, KDD, SIGIR, etc.) or open-source ML experience
- Hands-on experience with large-scale distributed training of generative models (LLMs, VLMs, sequence models).
- Hands-on experience with distributed tooling for ML data pipelines (e.g. Spark, Hive, MapReduce)
- Hands-on experience leading ambiguous ML and research efforts in building, applying and improving GenAI models for content understanding, search and recommendation systems.
- Technical leadership and experience in setting direction for roadmaps that span modeling, data pipelines and productionization, and aligning stakeholders on priorities, trade-offs, and execution plans.
- Excellent cross-functional communication and collaboration skills

Relocation Statement:

- This position is not eligible for relocation assistance. Visit our[PinFlex](https://www.pinterestcareers.com/pinflex/) page to learn more about our working model.

In-Office Requirement Statement:

- We recognize that the ideal environment for work is situational and may differ across departments. What this looks like day-to-day can vary based on the needs of each organization or role.
- This role will need to be in the office for in-person collaboration 1-2 times/quarter and can be situated anywhere in the USA.

## #LI-AK7

## #LI-REMOTE

At Pinterest we believe the workplace should be equitable, inclusive, and inspiring for every employee. In an effort to provide greater transparency, we are sharing the base salary range for this position. The position is also eligible for equity. Final salary is based on a number of factors including location, travel, relevant prior experience, or particular skills and expertise.

Information regarding the culture at Pinterest and benefits available for this position can be found [here](https://www.pinterestcareers.com/pinterest-life/).

US based applicants only $189,308—$389,753 USD

Our Commitment to Inclusion:

Pinterest is an equal opportunity employer and makes employment decisions on the basis of merit. We want to have the best qualified people in every job. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion or religious creed, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, status as a protected veteran, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information or characteristics (or those of a family member) or any other consideration made unlawful by applicable federal, state or local laws. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you require a medical or religious accommodation during the job application process, please complete [this form](https://forms.gle/sS24D4WboEKUZMQK6) for support.

By submitting this application, I certify that all information submitted in my application and throughout the hiring process is true, accurate, and complete to the best of my knowledge. I understand that any false statement, omission, or misrepresentation may disqualify me from employment consideration or result in termination if discovered after hire.

## About Pinterest

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Pinterest is a visual discovery engine that helps people find inspiration for their lives, from recipes and home decor to fashion and travel.
- **Entity Type**: Public (NYSE: PINS)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2010
- **Founders**: Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, Evan Sharp

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Social media / Visual discovery
- **Target customers**: B2C (consumers seeking inspiration) and B2B (advertisers and brands)
- **Mission**: “Bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love.” [pinterestcareers.com](https://www.pinterestcareers.com/)

## Products & Services
- **Pinterest Platform**: A visual bookmarking and discovery tool where users create and share idea boards (SaaS/web/mobile).
- **Pinterest Ads**: An advertising platform enabling businesses to reach users through promoted pins, shopping ads, and video content.
- **Shopping Features**: Product pins, visual search, and direct purchase links that integrate e-commerce into the discovery experience.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange (ticker: PINS). Market capitalization fluctuates; refer to latest financial reports for current figures.
- **Key Metric**: Annual revenue (FY2024 reported ~$3.2 billion) – not explicitly provided in search results; see SEC filings.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Early investors include SV Angel, Bessemer Venture Partners, and FirstMark Capital. Key partners include Shopify, Google Cloud, and Amazon Ads.
- **Growth Signals**: 186 open positions listed on the careers site, global offices in San Francisco, Seattle, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, Toronto, and Dublin. CEO Bill Ready emphasizes a “positive internet” business model as a growth differentiator. [pinterestcareers.com/jobs](https://www.pinterestcareers.com/jobs/)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Visual-first discovery**: Unlike text-based search engines, Pinterest uses image recognition and AI to surface ideas visually.
- **High-intent user base**: Users actively seek inspiration, making the platform highly valuable for advertisers.
- **AI at the core**: Machine learning powers recommendations, visual search, and shopping personalization.
- **Positive brand positioning**: Focus on inspiration and positivity differentiates it from other social platforms.

## Strategic Focus
- **AI and shopping**: Deep investment in AI to improve discovery and enable seamless shopping experiences.
- **Global expansion**: Growing international user base and advertiser ecosystem.
- **Creator and merchant tools**: Empowering content creators and small businesses to reach audiences directly.
- **Workplace flexibility**: The “PinFlex” model balances in-person collaboration with remote work autonomy. [pinterestcareers.com/inside-pinterest/pinflex](https://www.pinterestcareers.com/inside-pinterest/pinflex/)

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: “Create the career you love” – emphasis on positivity, inclusion, and belonging. [pinterestcareers.com](https://www.pinterestcareers.com/)
- **Work model (PinFlex)**: Flexible – employees can work from an office or remotely within their country/region. In-person collaboration happens when it drives impact. A “Global30” program allows up to 30 days of work abroad per year. [pinterestcareers.com/inside-pinterest/pinflex](https://www.pinterestcareers.com/inside-pinterest/pinflex/)
- **Benefits**: Minimum 20 weeks global paid parental leave; comprehensive health, mental health, and wellness benefits; fertility and family building support; flexible vacation; retirement plans; home office stipend; office meals and snacks. [pinterestcareers.com/inside-pinterest/benefits](https://www.pinterestcareers.com/inside-pinterest/benefits/)
- **Engineering culture**: AI is central to product innovation. Candidates may be asked to use AI tools during interviews, but individual skills are assessed fairly. [pinterestcareers.com/candidate-hub](https://www.pinterestcareers.com/candidate-hub/)
- **Interview process**: Transparent, competency-based interviews with recruiter, hiring manager, and cross-functional partners. Accommodations available. [pinterestcareers.com/candidate-hub](https://www.pinterestcareers.com/candidate-hub/)

## Sources
1. [pinterestcareers.com](https://www.pinterestcareers.com/) – Company overview, mission, culture
2. [pinterestcareers.com/jobs](https://www.pinterestcareers.com/jobs/) – Open positions and locations
3. [pinterestcareers.com/inside-pinterest/benefits](https://www.pinterestcareers.com/inside-pinterest/benefits/) – Benefits and philosophy
4. [pinterestcareers.com/inside-pinterest/pinflex](https://www.pinterestcareers.com/inside-pinterest/pinflex/) – Flexible work model details
5. [pinterestcareers.com/candidate-hub](https://www.pinterestcareers.com/candidate-hub/) – Interview process and FAQs

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