Machine Learning Manager, Search

About Pinterest

Millions of people around the world come to Pinterest 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.

Pinterest helps more than 450 million people discover new ideas to help design their life, with users running over 6 billion search queries every month. These queries often represent broad, exploratory intent, requiring a search system that deeply understands user intent, personalizes results, harnesses visual signals, and shows engaging content upfront. The team also owns query refinements and modules to help Pinners narrow their search. This makes Pinterest search a unique challenge, offering an opportunity to innovate on a product only Pinterest can build.

We are looking for an exceptional technical leader and engineering manager to help lead the search backend team that spans across Palo Alto and Seattle.

What You Will Do as a Machine Learning Manager, Search

• Be responsible for major areas of the search engine for more than 450 million monthly active Pinterest users, including indexing and document ranking, query and content understanding, personalization, ML-based retrieval, shopping, videos, as well as infrastructure efficiency and scalability.
• Work on innovative applications of NLP and Vision Models, and other techniques to drive query recommendations, multimodal search, agentic search, multimodal query understanding, and query-based module generation and ranking.
• Collaborate closely with other Pinterest engineering teams, such as Search Product, Infrastructure, research, and content signals, to deliver a superior search experience.
• Deeply understand the Pinterest search product and drive the vision for the team.
• Provide visibility for senior leadership into the team’s global impact.
• Partner with stakeholders across the company, including product management, data scientists, and design, to expand impact.
• Mentor and grow managers, leaders, and engineers on the team.
• Build a culture of excellence and expertise.

What We Are Looking For

• Experience leading and working on large-scale production search, recommendation, or ads systems based on state-of-the-art machine learning and big data technology.
• Strong preference for applied machine learning experience. Experience in related fields such as recommendation systems, natural language processing, and computer vision is a bonus.
• Ability to drive the roadmap and directions of scalable production-quality systems end-to-end.
• A knack for product and understanding user impact on a consumer product.
• 3+ years of experience in leading/managing a highly impactful ML-based engineering team of 5+ size; 7+ years of software development experience.
• Bachelors degree in computer science or related technical field, or equivalent experience.

Key Skills/Competency

• Machine Learning
• Search Engine Optimization
• Natural Language Processing (NLP)
• Computer Vision
• Big Data Technologies
• System Scalability
• Team Leadership
• Product Vision
• Personalization
• Indexing and Ranking