Engineering Manager II, Machine Learning – User Understanding

Pinterest is a platform where millions of people find creative ideas and plan for lasting memories. They are seeking an Engineering Manager to lead the User Understanding team, focusing on building data and backend systems that enhance user modeling and personalization.

Responsibilities:

• Lead and mentor a team of experienced machine learning engineers in developing advanced user understanding models and systems, which are integral to key Pinterest products across Discovery, Ads, and Growth
• Collaborate cross-functionally with partners in Product, Data Science, and Engineering to define strategy, set priorities, and effectively integrate user insights into core systems and product features
• Drive experimentation and adoption of new user understanding models with product teams across Pinterest, ensuring measurable end-to-end impact on key metrics
• Manage project execution and stakeholder communication, including roadmap planning, technical decision-making, risk mitigation, and progress updates to achieve business goals
• Provide thought leadership in user modeling and recommender systems by setting a long-term technical vision and advancing the state-of-the-art in the field
• Foster a collaborative, inclusive, and high-performing team culture

Requirements:

• 6+ years of industry experience in applied machine learning or closely related roles, with experience developing large-scale machine learning for recommendation or ads systems
• 2+ years of people management experience leading engineering teams
• Demonstrated ML expertise with a proven track record of impactful solutions and a deep understanding of large scale distributed systems
• Strong technical leadership, including a passion for driving technical direction, system architecture, and designing robust, scalable ML solutions
• 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