Director of Engineering, Core & Ads Serving Platform

About the role

This leadership position oversees the technical strategy for indexing and retrieval infrastructure across the Core, Ads, and Shopping divisions. You will guide the development of high-scale systems to improve content freshness, relevance, and cost efficiency for the Pinterest discovery experience.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Establish the long-term technical vision for indexing and retrieval, balancing architecture investments with measurable gains in reliability and performance.
• Direct cross-organizational efforts to modernize indexing, specifically advancing real-time and incremental retrieval systems.
• Collaborate with product, ML, and infrastructure leadership to resolve tradeoffs and deliver shared platform capabilities.
• Set high standards for system design, architecture reviews, and document ingestion workflows.
• Develop shared tools for metrics, tuning, and debugging to help teams manage the balance between relevance, safety, revenue, and infrastructure costs.
• Mentor senior engineering staff and technical leaders to promote operational excellence and inclusive collaboration.
• Integrate AI tools to accelerate prototyping, technical analysis, and documentation while maintaining rigorous verification standards.

Requirements

• Extensive experience building large-scale search, recommendation, or ads retrieval systems, including distributed infrastructure and real-time architectures.
• Proven track record of technical leadership across multiple teams, influencing complex platform decisions and driving modernization initiatives.
• Ability to connect high-level platform design to downstream ML requirements, product quality, and business outcomes.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to explain technical topics to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Demonstrated proficiency in using AI to improve engineering workflows, paired with the judgment to validate AI-assisted outputs for accuracy and safety.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Practical notes

• Candidates must be within a commutable distance of the San Francisco or Palo Alto offices.
• In-person collaboration is required 1-2 times per quarter.
• Relocation assistance is not provided for this role.
• Applicants must be authorized to work in the US.