Staff Software Engineer, Capacity Engineering

Pinterest is a platform that helps people discover creative ideas and plan meaningful experiences. The Staff Software Engineer, Capacity Engineering will drive performance and efficiency across large-scale cloud-native infrastructure, including Kubernetes and distributed systems, while partnering with engineering and SRE teams and leveraging AI to improve optimization and operational insights.

Responsibilities:

• Drive efficiency in large-scale shared environments like Kubernetes, including scheduling optimization, resource-overhead reduction, and resource isolation in multi-tenant clusters
• Improve the performance and efficiency of large scale distributed systems that drive Pinterest systems
• Use profiling and performance tooling fluently to root-cause performance and efficiency problems, propose solutions, and partner with the owning teams to implement and validate them
• Collaborate with Infrastructure Engineering and SRE teams in their mission to deliver highly available, resilient, secure and efficient foundations for Pinterest’s tech stack
• Leverage AI to scale the impact of yourself and the team, including:
• Accelerate performance investigations (e.g. quickly distill logs/metrics/traces and prior learnings) while verifying findings through measurement and testing
• Build tooling and agents that allow users to self-serve efficiency insights and recommendations
• Iterate faster on optimization approaches and rollout plans, then validate impact with experiments and production guardrails

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, a related field or equivalent experience
• Deep understanding of infrastructure capacity and performance, with a strong command of system and hardware fundamentals (how things work under the hood: CPU, memory, OS scheduling, I/O)
• Experience leading efficiency initiatives at scale on Kubernetes or other large scale shared infrastructure
• Strong technical and performance engineering skills, including fluency with profiling and performance tools such as perf and async-profiler, to root-cause complex, ambiguous problems and collaborate with stakeholders to drive solutions to implementation
• Experience building and managing highly available distributed applications at scale
• Proficiency in software development languages such as Java, Python and C++
• Excellent skills in communicating complex technical issues
• Experience with AWS or similar cloud environments
• Demonstrated ability to use AI to improve speed and quality in your day-to-day workflow for relevant outputs
• Strong track record of critical evaluation and verification of AI-assisted work (e.g., testing, source-checking, data validation, peer review)
• High integrity and ownership: you protect sensitive data, avoid over-reliance on AI, and remain accountable for final decisions and deliverables
• This role will need to be in the office for in-person collaboration 1-2 times/month and therefore can be situated anywhere in the country
• US based applicants only
• Hands-on experience with large, cloud-native multi-tenant platforms at Internet scale