Sr. Manager, Machine Learning Engineering-Applied Research

About this role

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 on a mission to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love. The Applied Science team plays a critical role in this mission by developing cutting-edge machine learning solutions that scale across all of Pinterest engineering teams (see our team’s publications).

We're looking for a highly technical Engineering Manager with a deep understanding of modern recommendation systems to manage, lead and develop a team of machine learning researchers and engineers within the Applied Science team. In this role, you will help the team build a portfolio of work which can balance that addresses both immediate short-term business needs and long-term strategic breakthroughs. You will partner with senior leaders to evolve our technical roadmap and directly drive Pinterest’s core mission forward.

What you will do:

• Vision and Strategy: Own the technical roadmap and strategic vision for Pinterest’s next-generation recommendation systems. Champion the use of state-of-the-art ML techniques to deliver revolutionary innovations in recommendation technology.

• Research to Production: Successfully transition breakthrough ML research into production-ready systems that directly impact core company metrics.

• Team Leadership and Culture: Manage, inspire, and develop a talented team of machine learning researchers and engineers specializing in recommendation systems. Partner with your team to define their charter, ensuring a strong balance between cutting-edge research and building foundational embeddings that benefit products across the entire company.

• Cross-functional Collaboration: Collaborate with Core Engineering, Ads Engineering, Infrastructure, Content, and Data Science teams to prototype, build, and scale solutions to complex engineering challenges. Partner with leadership to deepen user understanding and set the strategic direction for our recommendation system roadmap.

What we are looking for:

• Technical Depth: 7+ years of combined post-graduate academic and industry experience applying state-of-the-art ML technologies to real-world problems on web-scale data, alongside 3+ years of direct people management experience.

• Proven Execution: A track record of delivering high-impact initiatives across multiple product areas, with a demonstrated ability to influence peers and leadership using data-driven insights.

• Talent Development: Experience mentoring, coaching, and up-leveling software and machine learning engineers.

• Continuous Learner: A self-propelled learner who stays ahead of industry trends, new tools, and emerging methodologies, with an appetite for building proof-of-concept prototypes.

• Business & Product Acumen: The ability to transform vague, ambiguous questions into well-defined projects with clear success metrics that drive business decisions.

• Communication & Credibility: Excellent communication skills with the ability to distill complex technical findings for leadership and product teams, backed by a strong track record of publications in machine learning, AI, data science, or related technical fields.

• Academic Credentials: MS/PhD in Computer Science, ML, NLP, Statistics, Information Sciences or related field

• Nice to have:

• Track record of publishing at top-tier ML/RecSys conferences (KDD, RecSys, NeurIPS, CVPR).

• Experience leveraging modern LLM/Agentic workflows and generative AI capabilities to accelerate engineering productivity and context…