Sr. Staff Software Engineer, Notifications Experience

About Pinterest:

Millions of people across the world come to Pinterest to find new ideas every day. It’s where they get inspiration, dream about new possibilities and plan for what matters most. Our mission is to help those people find their inspiration and create a life they love. In your role, you’ll be challenged to take on work that upholds this mission and pushes Pinterest forward. You’ll grow as a person and leader in your field, all the while helping Pinners make their lives better in the positive corner of the internet.

Creating a life you love also means finding a career that celebrates the unique perspectives and experiences that you bring. As you read through the expectations of the position, consider how your skills and experiences may complement the responsibilities of the role. We encourage you to think through your relevant and transferable skills from prior experiences.

Our new progressive work model is called PinFlex, a term that’s uniquely Pinterest to describe our flexible approach to living and working. Visit our PinFlex landing page to learn more.

The Notifications team directly contributes to the company’s top line growth (MAUs) by reducing user churn and nudging dormant users to come back to the platform. The team focuses on minimizing user churn by keeping Pinterest top-of-mind for Pinners with engaging and contextual notifications that continuously give them a compelling reason to return to Pinterest. This is accomplished through:

• Developing and operating the company-wide Notifications Delivery Platform (NEP), which is used by multiple teams within Core to spin up and run notification campaigns (omni-channel off-app).
• Developing and operating ML/AI pipelines for generating and delivering highly personalized recommendations at scale.
• Developing and operating the in-app Newshub surface, which is used as a launch-pad for further in-app exploration by engaged users.

What you’ll do

• Partner with Eng and Product leads for Notifications to craft a compelling, ambitious and impactful multi-year AI/ML-powered technical strategy for evolving Notifications at Pinterest (e.g. Taking NEP Platform to the next level).
• Influence the broader technical vision and strategy for Pinner Lifecycle through effective collaborations with Engineering (EMs, TLs and Senior ICs) and Cross-functional Stakeholders (PMs, Data Scientists, Designers and PMMs).
• Translate the multi-year technical strategy for Notifications into a concrete engineering roadmap and lead the team’s technical execution towards realizing the vision (team of 25+ engineers).
• Proactively foresees the potential risks in the engineering roadmap in the planning stage, leverages technical insight to provide mitigation plans, and gives appropriate feedback to other projects on review to adjust course to more stable solutions.

What we’re looking for:

• 8+ years of experience with developing and operating large-scale distributed services/systems.
• 3+ years of experience with developing technical strategy for one or more AI/ML-powered core product teams (e.g. Growth, Search, Ads etc.).
• Excellent track record of collaborating with strong Engineering (EMs, TLs and Senior ICs) and Cross-functional Stakeholders (PMs, Data Scientists, Designers and PMMs) to influence the team’s 12 – 24 month engineering strategy.
• Experience with building and scaling large-scale communications platforms (e.g. Pinterest’s NEP, LinkedIn’s Air Traffic Controller, Uber’s OOA Communications platform, Braze’s SageAI etc.) or large-scale content recommender/ranking systems (e.g. Ads Ranking, Feed Ranking, Search Ranking etc.).
• Excellent understanding about how ML/AI fits into the broader system and drives product/business objectives.
• Strong skills around systems-based thinking, first-principles based thinking and technical problem solving (e.g. topics discussed in Hidden Technical Debt in Machine Learning Systems).