{"id":2094948,"url":"https://alion.io/job/pinterest-staff-machine-learning-engineer-content-visual-ai","title":"Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Content Visual AI","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":"2026-10-13T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","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","New York, United States","Seattle, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":242000,"max_usd":495000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":780},"experience_years_min":7,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Embeddings","optional":false},{"name":"Ignite","optional":false},{"name":"Knowledge Distillation","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Model Distillation","optional":false},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":false},{"name":"Recommender Systems","optional":false},{"name":"Self-Supervised Learning","optional":false},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-08T15:49:26Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-08","last_verified_at":"2026-10-13T03:45:44Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":4,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":4},"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.\nThe User and Content Foundations org is responsible for deeply understanding our content, users and their interactions by generating high-quality, reusable signals and insights that power relevance and personalization across the platform. We work at the intersection of distributed machine learning, large multimodal models, data infrastructure, and product adoption to build foundational capabilities that support our partners, including Discovery, Search, Growth, and Ads. We are looking for an experienced Staff Machine Learning Engineer / Technical Lead who can drive the team’s technical direction, lead the team in building scalable content understanding systems, and make an impact on core Pinterest user and business outcomes. In this role, you will lead ambiguous, high-impact scientific and engineering efforts that create reusable representations, models, and signals. You’ll work across research, machine learning, infrastructure, and engineering domains to turn advances in VLMs, LLMs, multimodal learning and sequence modeling into impact. This role is ideal for a deeply technical leader who combines strong ML judgment with product intuition. Expertise in visual representation learning and content understanding is especially valuable; experience with user understanding, recommender systems and LLMs is also highly relevant.\nWhat will you be doing:\nSet the technical direction and multi-quarter strategy for foundational ML capabilities across visual representation learning, multimodal content understanding, and LLM-based personalization.\nLead high-impact scientific and technical initiatives from problem definition and research strategy through experimentation, productionization, and adoption.\nBuild reusable embeddings, representations, semantic signals, and ML infrastructure while advancing techniques such as VLMs, LLMs, sequence modeling, self-supervised learning, retrieval, and distillation.\nPartner with Product, Data Science, Applied Science, and Engineering to translate foundational capabilities into product outcomes and influence cross-functional roadmaps and investments.\nEstablish rigorous practices for modeling, data pipelines, distributed training, inference, evaluation, experimentation, and operational excellence while mentoring engineers and scientists.\nWhat we’re looking for:\nMinimum 7 years of industry experience, including 2+ years of tech leading teams\nMS or PhD degree in computer science, machine learning, or equivalent industry experience.\nPublications at top machine learning, multimodal and/or data mining conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, ECCV, ACL, KDD, SIGIR, etc.) or open-source ML experience\nHands-on experience with large-scale distributed training of generative models (LLMs, VLMs, sequence models).\nHands-on experience with distributed tooling for ML data pipelines (e.g. Spark, Hive, MapReduce)\nHands-on experience leading ambiguous ML and research efforts in building, applying and improving GenAI models for content understanding, search and recommendation systems.\nTechnical leadership and experience in setting direction for roadmaps that span modeling, data pipelines and productionization, and aligning stakeholders on priorities, trade-offs, and execution plans.\nExcellent cross-functional communication and collaboration skills\nRelocation Statement:\nThis position is not eligible for relocation assistance. Visit ourPinFlex 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 1-2 times/quarter and can be situated anywhere in the USA.\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$189,308—$389,753 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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