Manager II, Machine Learning Engineering-Content Foundation
San Francisco, CA · Remote, CA · San Francisco · USD 222,716-389,753 · 2+ years experience · Remote · Posted Oct 1, 2026
At a glance
- Experience
- 2+ years experience
- Workplace
- Remote
- Location
- San Francisco, CA · Remote, CA · San Francisco
- Salary
- USD 222,716-389,753 · Base salary
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 helps Pinners discover and do what they love. The Content Foundation ML team is responsible for understanding the semantic meaning of Pinterest content and generating high-quality, reusable signals and insights that power relevance and personalization across the platform. We work at the intersection of machine learning, large multimodal models, data infrastructure, and product adoption to build foundational content understanding capabilities that support Discovery, Search, Growth, and Ads. We are looking for an experienced Engineering Manager who can drive the team’s technical direction, lead the team in building scalable content understanding systems, and make an impact on core Pinterest user and business outcomes.
About the role
- Pinterest is looking for a Manager II, Machine Learning Engineering for the Content Foundation team.
- The team is responsible for understanding semantic meaning and generating high-quality, reusable signals and insights that power relevance and personalization.
- The role drives technical direction, leads the team in building scalable content understanding systems, and impacts core user and business outcomes.
Responsibilities
- Lead, mentor and grow a team of engineers and applied scientists in developing foundational content understanding signals, infrastructure and systems.
- Provide thought leadership in content understanding and machine learning by setting a long-term technical vision for semantic signal generation, reusable foundational layers, and scalable model-powered infrastructure.
- Partner closely with product, data science, and downstream engineering teams to ensure signals drive meaningful impact across Pinterest.
- Manage project execution and stakeholder communication, including roadmap planning, technical decision-making, risk mitigation, and progress updates.
- Leverage VLM and LLM technologies to understand the full semantic richness of Pinterest content and generate high-quality signals with strong precision, recall and coverage across multiple locales.
- Build reusable foundational layers such as captions, summaries and semantic descriptors to power multiple downstream use cases efficiently and at low infra cost.
- Improve inference throughput, freshness and serving efficiency to keep up with millions of new Pins and evolving content every day.
- Measure and improve the downstream impact of content understanding signals on relevance, personalization, engagement and ads performance across different surfaces.
- Build robust monitoring, evaluation and debugging systems that ensure signal quality, accessibility, latency and freshness at scale.
Requirements
- 7+ years of industry experience, including 2+ years of management experience.
- Masters degree in computer science, computer engineering, or equivalent work experience.
- Publication at top machine learning and data mining conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, KDD, SIGIR).
- Experience with large scale distributed training and inference of LLM and VLM models.
- Experience with distributed tooling for ML data pipelines, e.g. Hadoop, Spark.
- Experience leading ambiguous ML projects to build, apply and improve GenAI models for content understanding and recommendation systems.
- Proven technical leadership across both ML and Data systems, with experience setting direction for multi-quarter roadmaps spanning modeling, data pipelines, and productionization.
- Excellent cross-functional communication and collaboration skills.
Benefits
- Equity
Workplace
- Role needs to be in the office for in-person collaboration 1-2 times/quarter and can be situated anywhere in the USA.
Skills
- LLM
- VLM
- GenAI
- Hadoop
- Spark
- Machine Learning
- Data Pipelines
