Principal Engineer, Core - Pinner Journeys
Core
Define long-term technical strategy and architecture for Homefeed, Search, and AI Assistant, focusing on retrieval, ranking, personalization, and generative AI to improve user discovery and engagement.
Role type
Principal Engineer (Search, Recommendations, Generative AI)
Builds
Large-scale retrieval and ranking systems, LLM integrations, and multi-year architectural transformations for core discovery surfaces.
Domain
Consumer discovery, search, and generative AI
Deliverable
production ML models
Required skills
Large-scale retrieval and ranking, representation learning, search systems, large language models and generative AI, multi-year architectural transformation, product intuition for 0→1 bets, mentoring senior engineers
Preferred skills
Experience in consumer discovery products at global scale, building AI assistants or agentic workflows
Technologies
Learning-to-rank, multi-task optimization, bandits, RL for recommendations, embeddings, multi-modal models, dense and sparse retrieval, indexing, query understanding, RAG, agents
Responsibilities
Define long-term technical strategy and architecture; Drive multi-year roadmap for unifying signals and models; Lead design of large-scale retrieval and ranking systems; Architect LLM and foundation model integration; Set direction for experimentation and evaluation frameworks; Provide hands-on technical leadership on high-leverage projects; Partner with Product, Data Science, and Research; Raise bar for engineering excellence; Represent Pinterest externally
Seniority
Principal, strategy & mentorship