Sr. Staff Engineer, Performance Ad Formats

About Pinterest:

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At 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.

Through 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.

Pinterest is looking for a Senior Staff Software Engineer to lead Performance Ads Formats, a team building ad products and experiences that help Pinners turn intent into action and help lower-funnel advertisers drive stronger outcomes. In this role, you’ll be a senior technical leader across a suite of products such as Deal Ads, dynamic ad experiences, post ad click journeys, and more.

You’ll partner closely with Product, Design, Data Science, PMM, TPM, and Engineering leaders to turn ambiguous opportunities into scalable, reliable ad products with measurable business impact.

What you’ll do:

• Lead technical strategy and architecture across Performance Ads Formats, with a focus on growing good clicks, improving click quality, increasing conversions, and enhancing the Pinner experience.

• Drive cross-functional product initiatives from discovery through launch and readout, including workstreams such as post-click ad journeys, dynamic ad formats, deal ads, etc.

• Design scalable, resilient, and maintainable systems across client, API, backend, and partner surfaces, biasing for impact and balancing speed, quality, privacy / compliance needs, and long-term ownership.

• Partner with Product and Data Science to make data-driven prioritization and launch decisions, using experiment results, guardrails, and business impact to decide what to scale, iterate, or stop.

• Raise the production quality bar through strong design reviews, code reviews, testing strategy, QA / bug bash processes, observability, incident readiness, and thoughtful tech debt reduction.

• Mentor senior engineers and create technical strategy docs, design docs, code, and analysis artifacts that become examples of clarity, simplicity, and quality across multiple teams.

• Use pragmatic tools, including AI where useful, to accelerate knowledge discovery, prototyping, documentation, and quality checks while applying strong judgment and verification.

What we’re looking for:

• Deep technical architecture expertise in high-scale product systems, with the ability to reason from first principles and dig deep into how complex technical systems work under the hood.

• A track record of leading technically complex, ambiguous, multi-team initiatives that shipped measurable product or business impact.

• Excellent cross-functional collaboration and communication skills, including the ability to align senior stakeholders, make tradeoffs explicit, and influence without authority.

• Strong data-driven decision making and prioritization: you can explain why something is the right bet, what evidence supports it, and how you would know whether it worked.

• A production-quality mindset for scalable, reliable, maintainable software, including testing, observability, incident response, operational cost, and long-term system health.

• Experience mentoring Senior and Staff engineers and raising the technical bar through reviews, architecture guidance, knowledge sharing, and crisp technical writing.

• 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.

• Nice to have: experience in ads, e-commerce, recommendations, experimentation platforms, or practical AI-assisted engineering workflows.

• Bachelor’s/Master’s degree in a relevant field such as Computer Science, or 8+ YOE as a Software Engineer.

Relocation Statement:

• This position is not eligible for relocation assistance. Visit our PinFlex page to learn more about our working model.

In-Office Requirement Statement:

• We let the type of work you do guide the collaboration style. That means we're not always working in an office, but we continue to gather for key moments of collaboration and connection.

• This role will need to be in the office for in-person collaboration once a week and therefore needs to be in a commutable distance from one of the following offices: San Francisco or Palo Alto offices.

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At 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.

Information regarding the culture at Pinterest and benefits available for this position can be found here.

US based applicants only
$245,402—$429,454 USD

Our Commitment to Inclusion:

Pinterest 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.