Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Programmatic Ads

About Pinterest:

Millions 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.

Discover 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.

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 building a new Programmatic Ads ML team to bring in exchange-sourced ads demand and supply. We’re looking for a Staff ML engineer to develop core bidding and ranking systems that help us optimally buy and sell inventory across exchanges, driving strong ROI for advertisers and growing a critical revenue stream for Pinterest.

What you’ll do:

• 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.
• Introduce and productionize new exchange and supply signals (e.g., quality, conversions, identity, fraud, content understanding) to unlock incremental advertiser value.
• Partner closely with Ads Ranking & Bidding, Measurement, and Programmatic Engineering to integrate new models and objectives into the ads stack.
• Use AI to accelerate analysis, experimentation, and iteration (e.g., exploring model variants, automating path from learnings to launch) while applying strong judgment and vision.

What we’re looking for

• Industry experience building and shipping large-scale production ML systems in ads, search, recommendations, or related domains.
• Deep experience with control/optimization algorithms for bidding, pacing, allocation, or similar marketplace problems.
• Strength in probabilistic modeling and mea