Sr. Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Content Ecosystem

Pinterest is a platform that inspires creativity and possibilities for millions. They are seeking a Sr. Staff Machine Learning Engineer to lead the technical strategy for improving the content ecosystem through machine learning, focusing on optimizing content health and performance.

Responsibilities:

• Set technical strategy and vision for ML systems that improve the end-to-end content ecosystem, including supply, distribution, and engagement/utility outcomes
• Partner with DS teams to develop a content ecosystem measurement framework to quantify content health and performance (e.g., content quality, freshness, diversity, coverage, creator/content sustainability, and user value), and align it with company/business goals
• Identify and close content gaps by building models and insights that answer: what content is missing, for whom, in which contexts, and why
• Deeply understand what content works and why by combining causal thinking, experimentation, and model interpretability to connect content attributes and distribution mechanisms to downstream user and business outcomes
• Build and optimize content marketplace mechanisms that balance multi-sided incentives and constraints (e.g., users, creators/publishers, advertisers, internal policy/safety), while maximizing long-term ecosystem value
• Design multi-objective optimization approaches that manage tradeoffs across relevance, quality, diversity, creator incentives, integrity/safety, and monetization
• Partner closely with cross-functional teams (Product, Data Science, UX Research, Content/Creator teams, Trust & Safety, Ads, Infra) to translate ambiguous ecosystem problems into clear technical roadmaps and deliver measurable impact
• Mentor and grow junior ML engineers through technical coaching, design reviews, career development support, and creating a culture of strong engineering and scientific rigor
• Raise the quality bar for ML engineering by establishing best practices for data quality, model governance, reliability, privacy-aware design, and operational excellence
• Communicate clearly and influence broadly by producing crisp technical proposals, aligning stakeholders on tradeoffs, and driving decisions across org boundaries
• Explore and apply advanced methods where beneficial—e.g., game-theoretic approaches, reinforcement learning, mechanism design, or bandit-style optimization—to improve marketplace dynamics and long-term ecosystem outcomes

Requirements:

• Strong fundamentals in machine learning and optimization, with the ability to apply them to real-world, high-scale ecosystem problems
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical strategy, navigate ambiguity, and deliver end-to-end impact
• Deep interest in marketplace dynamics (multi-sided incentives, feedback loops, long-term health metrics), and comfort with multi-objective tradeoffs
• Experience with 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
• Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, a related field or equivalent experience
• Background in game theory, reinforcement learning, mechanism design, or causal inference applied to ecosystems/marketplaces