Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Homefeed

What you'll do

• Own and advance a major technical area in automated recommendation research within Reflex, collaborating with other technical leads and partner teams.
• Build LLM agents that connect hypothesis generation, implementation, experiment execution, evaluation and learning from previous results.
• Develop rigorous evaluations for agent behavior and research outputs, and use them to improve quality, reliability and efficiency.
• Contribute to generative retrieval models, particularly Semantic ID learning, evaluation and integration into production recommendation systems.
• Take promising ideas from research and prototypes through offline evaluation, online experimentation and production launches.
• Build reliable integrations with ML development infrastructure and make informed tradeoffs across model quality, iteration speed, compute cost and operational complexity.
• Raise technical quality through hands-on implementation, design and code reviews, documentation and mentorship.
• Work with research, recommendation and ML infrastructure teams to shape technical approaches, resolve dependencies and support adoption.
• Identify and apply relevant advances from research, and contribute new methods where existing approaches fall short.

What we're looking for

• Bachelor's in Computer Science, Machine Learning or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Minimum 8 years of experience building and shipping ML or AI systems, including substantial hands-on engineering and technical leadership.
• Demonstrated experience building LLM agents or other agentic AI systems for complex tasks, with a clear approach to evaluating and improving their performance.
• Strong ML fundamentals and depth in one or more relevant areas, such as applied LLMs, representation learning, recommendation systems, retrieval or ML systems.
• Experience taking research ideas into reliable production systems and evaluating their impact through meaningful experiments.
• Strong software engineering skills, including the ability to design maintainable systems, implement difficult components and conduct thorough technical reviews.
• Experience leading a substantial technical area, making decisions under ambiguity and collaborating effectively across teams.
• A track record of mentoring engineers and raising the quality of a team’s technical work.
• Clear written and verbal communication, including the ability to explain technical tradeoffs to different audiences.
• A disciplined approach to using AI in your own work, including verification of generated code, analysis and conclusions.
• We'll teach you our stack and our products, and we're committed to your continued growth as a technical leader. This is an individual contributor role; prior people management isn't required.
• Relocation Statement: This position is not eligible for relocation assistance. Visit our
• PinFlex page to learn more about our working model.

In-Office Requirement Statement

• We let the type of work you do guide the collaboration style. That means we're not always working in an office, but we continue to gather for key moments of collaboration and connection.
• This role will need to be in the office for in-person collaboration 1-2 times/quarter and therefore can be situated anywhere in the country.
• #LI-REMOTE
• #LI-DM57

Pay and benefits

At Pinterest we believe the workplace should be equitable, inclusive, and inspiring for every employee. In an effort to provide greater transparency, we are sharing the base salary range for this position. The position is also eligible for equity. Final salary is based on a number of factors including location, travel, relevant prior experience, or particular skills and expertise.

Information regarding the culture at Pinterest and benefits available for this position can be found here.

US based applicants only $189,308—$389,753 USD

Our Commitment to Inclusion

By submitting this application, I certify that all information submitted in my application and throughout the hiring process is true, accurate, and complete to the best of my knowledge. I understand that any false statement, omission, or misrepresentation may disqualify me from employment consideration or result in termination if discovered after hire.