{"id":1977492,"url":"https://alion.io/job/pinterest-director-machine-learning-engineering-ads-quality","title":"Director, Machine Learning Engineering, Ads Quality","company":{"id":75,"name":"Pinterest","domain":"pinterest.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/pinterest","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":84,"open_postings":35,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.657,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":57,"computed_at":"2026-10-12T06:55:09Z"}},"role":"Leadership","role_family":"Leadership","seniority":"head","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Palo Alto, United States","San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":314580,"max":550515,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":550515},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":12,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Embeddings","optional":false},{"name":"Ignite","optional":false},{"name":"Knowledge Distillation","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Model Distillation","optional":false},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":false},{"name":"Reinforcement Learning","optional":false},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-06T21:30:23Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-06","last_verified_at":"2026-10-12T17:08:40Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":5,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":5},"description":"About Pinterest:\nMillions of people around the world come to our platform to find creative ideas, dream about new possibilities and plan for memories that will last a lifetime. At Pinterest, we’re on a mission to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love, and that starts with the people behind the product.\nDiscover a career where you ignite innovation for millions, transform passion into growth opportunities, celebrate each other’s unique experiences and embrace the flexibility to do your best work. Creating a career you love? It’s Possible.\nAt Pinterest, AI isn't just a feature, it's a powerful partner that augments our creativity and amplifies our impact, and we’re looking for candidates who are excited to be a part of that. To get a complete picture of your experience and abilities, we’ll explore your foundational skills and how you collaborate with AI.\nThrough our interview process, what matters most is that you can always explain your approach, showing us not just what you know, but how you think. You can read more about our AI interview philosophy and how we use AI in our recruiting process here.\nPinterest is a visual discovery platform where hundreds of millions of people come to find inspiration and decide what to try, buy, or do next. Our Ads Quality organization builds the machine-learning systems that make ads relevant and valuable to Pinners while delivering meaningful outcomes for advertisers.\nWe are seeking a Director of Machine Learning Engineering to lead a broad portfolio of Ads Quality modeling teams focused on engagement, conversion, ROAS optimization, ranking, representation learning, and ML-powered experimentation.\nIn this role, you will shape and drive a unified technical strategy across Ads Quality, leading teams responsible for engagement ranking, oCPM and conversion modeling, ROAS optimization, lightweight ranking and retrieval models, foundation model adoption, sequence and multimodal modeling, and the quality and efficiency of production machine learning systems.\nWhat you’ll do: \nSet the technical vision and multi-year strategy for Ads Quality machine learning, connecting model innovation to Pinner value, advertiser performance, revenue, and marketplace health.\nLead and develop a group of engineering managers, senior technical leaders, and machine-learning engineers across multiple modeling domains.\nEstablish a coherent modeling roadmap across engagement, conversion, ROAS, relevance, ranking, and foundation-model initiatives.\nDrive improvements in model quality, calibration, generalization, cold-start performance, attribution, and robustness across Pinterest surfaces.\nGuide the evolution of Ads models toward larger, more generalizable architectures, including foundation models, distillation, long-context sequence modeling, multimodal representations, and cross-domain learning.\nEnsure that modeling investments translate into reliable production outcomes through strong offline evaluation, online experimentation, launch discipline, and post-launch monitoring.\nPartner closely with Ads Product, Ads Data Science, Ads Signals, Ads Retrieval, Ads Delivery, Measurement, Core, ATG, and ML Infrastructure.\nSet expectations for training-serving parity, data quality, privacy, reliability, latency, capacity, and cost efficiency.\nImprove engineering velocity through better experimentation workflows, reusable modeling infrastructure, automation, and agentic development tools.\nBuild a culture of technical excellence, candid collaboration, inclusion, ownership, and continuous learning.\nRepresent Ads Quality ML in senior leadership forums and communicate strategy, tradeoffs, risks, and results clearly to technical and non-technical audiences.\nWhat we’re looking for:\nMinimum 12 years of experience building and deploying machine-learning systems, including significant experience leading managers and multi-team organizations.\nDemonstrated success leading large-scale recommendation, ranking, advertising, search, marketplace, or personalization ML teams.\nStrong understanding of modern deep-learning and recommender-system techniques, including sequence models, embeddings, multimodal models, multi-task learning, foundation models, distillation, and reinforcement learning.\nExperience with conversion, value, ROAS, bidding, or other lower-funnel optimization problems is strongly preferred.\nProven ability to connect modeling objectives and offline metrics to online experiments and business outcomes.\nExperience operating production ML systems with demanding requirements for latency, availability, calibration, privacy, reliability, and cost.\nStrong judgment in balancing near-term product delivery with foundational technical investments.\nTrack record of building high-performing organizations, developing senior leaders, and creating effective operating mechanisms.\nExcellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence across organizational boundaries.\nBachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, a related field, or equivalent experience; advanced degree preferred.\nRelocation Statement: This position is not eligible for relocation assistance. Visit our PinFlex page to learn more about our working model.\nIn-Office Requirement Statement:\nWe recognize that the ideal environment for work is situational and may differ across departments. What this looks like day-to-day can vary based on the needs of each organization or role.\nThis role will need to be in the office for in-person collaboration 1-2x per week and therefore needs to be in a commutable distance from one of the following offices: Palo Alto, San Francisco.\nAt Pinterest we believe the workplace should be equitable, inclusive, and inspiring for every employee. In an effort to provide greater transparency, we are sharing the base salary range for this position. The position is also eligible for equity. Final salary is based on a number of factors including location, travel, relevant prior experience, or particular skills and expertise.\nInformation regarding the culture at Pinterest and benefits available for this position can be found here.\nUS based applicants only\n$314,580—$550,515 USD\nOur Commitment to Inclusion:\nPinterest is an equal opportunity employer and makes employment decisions on the basis of merit. We want to have the best qualified people in every job. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion or religious creed, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, status as a protected veteran, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information or characteristics (or those of a family member) or any other consideration made unlawful by applicable federal, state or local laws. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you require a medical or religious accommodation during the job application process, please complete this form for support.\nBy submitting this application, I certify that all information submitted in my application and throughout the hiring process is true, accurate, and complete to the best of my knowledge. 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