Staff Software Engineer, Activation Team

Pinterest is a platform that inspires creativity and helps users plan memorable experiences. As a Staff Engineer on the Activation team, you'll drive the technical strategy for backend systems that enhance user experience, focusing on new and returning users while collaborating with cross-functional teams to solve technical challenges.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the technical roadmap for activation backend systems, defining the highest-impact opportunities for new and returning users
• Drive hands-on backend engineering across APIs, event pipelines, production systems, and recommendation serving
• Build signal infrastructure that captures user intent from entry points and makes it available to recommendation systems
• Collaborate closely with ML engineers, building the backend infrastructure that ML models depend on
• Partner with product managers and data scientists to translate user problems into technical opportunities
• Drive cross-team technical initiatives, authoring design documents and building alignment across engineering orgs
• Own system reliability, production readiness, and operational health for activation backend systems
• Mentor and develop engineers on the team

Requirements:

• 5+ years of experience building and shipping large-scale backend systems at consumer internet companies
• 2+ years of experience as a senior IC driving cross-team projects with measurable business impact
• Strong product mindset with the ability to identify which technical problems matter most for business impact
• Track record of rapid execution and driving projects to completion in ambiguous environments
• Strong systems design skills across distributed systems, event-driven architectures, and service-oriented backends
• Familiarity with ML infrastructure concepts and ability to build systems that support ML workloads
• Strong collaboration and communication skills across engineering and product audiences
• Experience mentoring engineers and establishing technical best practices
• Demonstrated ability to use AI to accelerate your workflow while maintaining high standards for verification, data integrity, and ownership of final outputs
• Degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience