Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Ads Bidding & Pacing
San Francisco, CA · Palo Alto, CA · Seattle, WA · Palo Alto · USD 222,716-389,753 · 6+ years experience · Onsite · Posted Sep 29, 2026
At a glance
- Experience
- 6+ years experience
- Workplace
- Onsite
- Location
- San Francisco, CA · Palo Alto, CA · Seattle, WA · Palo Alto
- 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 is one of the fastest growing online ad platforms, and our success depends on building a suite of bid strategies that help advertisers achieve their goals within the Pinterest marketplace.
- We support both automatic bidding (maximizes the number of clicks, conversions and GMV) as well as target average bidding (CPA or ROAS targets) for Pinterest ads. We’re looking for an ML engineer with experience in ads delivery, machine learning, bid landscapes, and automatic bidding / ads pacing to develop new data-driven techniques to drive ads delivery performance and maximum ROI for advertisers, growing Pinterest’s revenue stream.
About the role
- Pinterest is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer for Ads Bidding & Pacing to develop new data-driven techniques that drive ads delivery performance and maximum ROI for advertisers.
- The role involves building a suite of bid strategies, supporting automatic bidding and target average bidding, and growing Pinterest's revenue stream.
Responsibilities
- Design target ROAS and automatic bidding & pacing algorithms for ads.
- Explore bid landscapes to maximize revenue and advertiser value.
- Work with product and sales teams to design and implement bidding strategies for new ad products.
- A/B Experiment with bidding algorithm improvement ideas.
- Collaborate with other teams to identify bidding and budgeting opportunities and capitalize on them.
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Statistics, a related field, or equivalent experience.
- 6+ years of industry experience in ads delivery, automatic bidding / pacing, target ROAS bidding, ads marketplace / utility, or machine learning.
- 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.
- Experience with Cursor, Copilot, Codex, or similar AI coding assistants for development, debugging, testing, and refactoring.
- Familiarity with LLM-powered productivity tools for documentation search, experiment analysis, SQL/data exploration, and engineering workflow acceleration.
Preferred qualifications
- Direct experience specifically with bidding or pacing is a big plus.
Benefits
- Equity
Workplace
- This role will need to be in the office for in-person collaboration 3 times per quarter and therefore needs to be in a commutable distance from San Francisco, Palo Alto, or Seattle offices.
Skills
- Cursor
- Copilot
- Codex
- SQL
