Staff Machine Learning Engineer (Programmatic Ads)

Join Pinterest as a Staff Machine Learning Engineer in the Programmatic Ads team. You will design and implement algorithms for real-time bidding, ad scoring/ranking, inventory selection, and yield optimization across multiple exchanges. You will own end-to-end ML systems, introduce and productionize new exchange and supply signals, and partner closely with various teams to integrate new models and objectives into the ads stack. You should have a strong background in probabilistic modeling, technical leadership, and industry experience in building large-scale production ML systems.

• Design and implement algorithms for real-time bidding, ad scoring/ranking, inventory selection, and yield optimization across multiple exchanges.
• Own end-to-end ML systems: problem framing, metrics, data/feature design, model training, evaluation, and online experimentation.
• Partner closely with Ads Ranking & Bidding, Measurement, and Programmatic Engineering to integrate new models and objectives into the ads stack.
• 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
• Strength in probabilistic modeling and measurement (e.g., quality/fraud signals, deep-learning engagement prediction) and making principled trade-offs between coverage, accuracy, and impact
• Proven Staff-level technical leadership as an IC: driving technical direction and cross-team alignment without formal people management
• Demonstrated ability to use AI to improve speed and quality of your workflow, with a strong track record of validating and stress-testing AI-assisted outputs
• Familiarity with LLM-powered productivity tools for documentation search, experiment analysis, SQL/data exploration, and engineering workflow acceleration
• Industry experience building and shipping large-scale production ML systems in ads, search, recommendations, or related domains
• Experience with Cursor, Copilot, Codex, or similar AI coding assistants for development, debugging, testing, and refactoring
• Degree in Computer Science, Statistics, or a related field
• Deep experience with control/optimization algorithms for bidding, pacing, allocation, or similar marketplace problems