{"id":129431,"url":"https://alion.io/job/pinterest-sr-staff-software-engineer-pinterest-assistant-2","title":"Sr. Staff Software Engineer, Pinterest Assistant","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":82,"open_postings":29,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.724,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":48,"computed_at":"2026-10-19T05:45:15Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"staff","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States","Seattle, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":208592,"max":429454,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":429454},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":10,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"Embeddings","optional":true},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":true},{"name":"RAG","optional":true},{"name":"Tool Use","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-08-10T16:17:06Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-05","last_verified_at":"2026-10-19T13:58:29Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":70,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":70},"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.\nWhat we’re looking for:\nMillions of people across the world come to Pinterest to find new ideas every day. It’s where they get inspiration, dream about new possibilities and plan for what matters most. Our mission is to help those people find their inspiration and create a life they love. In your role, you’ll be challenged to take on work that upholds this mission and pushes Pinterest forward. You’ll grow as a person and leader in your field, all the while helping Pinners make their lives better in the positive corner of the internet.\nWe are looking for a passionate, inquisitive, and well-rounded Sr. Staff Backend Engineer to join the Pinterest Assistant team. The team is building a visual-first, AI-powered companion that helps Pinners go from inspiration to action across shopping, search, and discovery. As the technical leader for our backend platform, you will define the architecture and technical direction that powers our multi-modal, conversational experiences at scale. You’ll drive foundational investments across orchestration, memory and personalization, context management, tool integrations, APIs, and platform infrastructure, enabling the next generation of AI experiences. Working closely with Product, Design, Frontend, Infrastructure, and Machine Learning teams, you’ll shape the long-term technical strategy, raise the engineering bar across the organization, and build reliable, high-quality experiences that delight millions of Pinners. \nWhat you’ll do:\nDefine and drive the technical vision and architecture for the backend systems powering Pinterest Assistant, ensuring they scale reliably as the product reaches millions of users.\nLead the design and implementation of the core Assistant platform including orchestration, memory and personalization, context management, APIs, tool integrations, and backend infrastructure. \nDrive technical strategy, identifying foundational platform investments that unlock new Assistant capabilities while improving developer velocity, reliability, and scalability.\nPartner closely with Product, Design, Frontend engineers, ML engineers, and Infrastructure teams to build a deeply personalized, multimodal conversational experience.\nShape the architecture for AI-powered applications, including retrieval, context assembly, tool execution, memory, and model orchestration, in partnership with ML teams.\nEstablish engineering best practices for production LLM and agent systems, including observability, logging, evals, safety mechanisms, rollout strategies, and incident response.\nMentor engineers, raising the technical bar through architecture reviews, technical guidance, and thoughtful engineering leadership.\nNavigate ambiguity and make pragmatic architectural decisions that balance rapid product iteration with long-term maintainability.\nInfluence technical direction beyond the immediate team by collaborating across teams and helping shape Pinterest’s broader AI platform strategy. \nStay current with advances in LLMs, agentic systems, and backend platform design, and apply them pragmatically to consumer product development.\nWhat we're looking for:\nBachelor’s degree in a relevant field such as computer science or equivalent experience\n10+ years of backend software engineering experience, including significant experience leading large, ambiguous systems that power consumer experience as a senior IC.\n3+ years operating as a technical lead, driving the architecture and development of large-scale distributed backend systems.\nStrong backend engineering experience in Python, TypeScript, Node or similar languages and ecosystems.\nExperience building platforms or foundational infrastructure that enables product teams to move faster.\nStrong understanding of modern model-driven systems and experience partnering closely with machine learning engineers on AI-powered products.\nStrong leadership, communication, and cross-functional collaboration skills\nFamiliarity with concepts such as retrieval, ranking, personalization, inference, context management, or orchestration, with ability to collaborate effectively on technical design.\nTrack record of mentoring senior engineers and elevating engineering quality across an organization\nProduct-minded and execution-oriented, with the ability to lead in ambiguity and move fluidly between strategy and hands-on implementation\nA strong builder’s mindset: you know how to create momentum in ambiguous spaces, make pragmatic early decisions, and lay the technical foundation for systems that will grow in scale, complexity, and impact over time.\n Nice to have:Experience building AI-powered or LLM-based products at scale\nExperience designing systems for conversational AI, agents, tool calling, or multimodal experiences.\nExperience with retrieval, ranking, recommendation, search, or personalization systems.\nFamiliarity with embeddings, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), context management, or memory architecture.\nExperience partnering with Applied Scientists or Machine Learning engineers to bring ML capabilities into production.\nFamiliarity with evaluation frameworks, experimentation, and quality frameworks for AI products.\nFull-stack development experience\n\nRelocation Statement: Insert whether this job is eligible for relocation assistance.\nThis 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 once per quarter and therefore can be situated anywhere in the country. \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$208,592—$429,454 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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