Engineering Manager II, Machine Learning – User Understanding
Location: San Francisco, CA, US; Remote, US
Department: Core Engineering
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 seeking an Engineering Manager to lead our User Understanding team. This team builds and maintains the data and backend systems that drive user modeling, personalization and recommendations—impacting hundreds of millions of users every day. You’ll set technical vision, empower a talented group of engineers, and collaborate closely with Machine Learning, Product, and Data Science to unlock better user experiences. We’re looking for a leader with deep infrastructure expertise, a passion for personalization and ML-driven experience, and a strong record of delivering ML-enabling platforms at scale.
What you will do:
- Lead and mentor a team of experienced machine learning engineers in developing advanced user understanding models and systems, which are integral to key Pinterest products across Discovery, Ads, and Growth.
- Collaborate cross-functionally with partners in Product, Data Science, and Engineering to define strategy, set priorities, and effectively integrate user insights into core systems and product features.
- Drive experimentation and adoption of new user understanding models with product teams across Pinterest, ensuring measurable end-to-end impact on key metrics.
- Manage project execution and stakeholder communication, including roadmap planning, technical decision-making, risk mitigation, and progress updates to achieve business goals.
- Provide thought leadership in user modeling and recommender systems by setting a long-term technical vision and advancing the state-of-the-art in the field.
- Foster a collaborative, inclusive, and high-performing team culture.
What we’re looking for:
- 6+ years of industry experience in applied machine learning or closely related roles, with experience developing large-scale machine learning for recommendation or ads systems.
- 2+ years of people management experience leading engineering teams.
- Demonstrated ML expertise with a proven track record of impactful solutions and a deep understanding of large scale distributed systems.
- Strong technical leadership, including a passion for driving technical direction, system architecture, and designing robust, scalable ML solutions.
Nice To Have:
- Experience using 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.
In-Office Requirement Statement:
- We recognize that the ideal environment for work is situational and may differ across departments. What this looks like day-to-day can vary based on the needs of each organization or role.
Relocation Statement:
- This position is not eligible for relocation assistance. Visit our PinFlex page to learn more about our working model.
#LI-AK7
#LI-REMOTE
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.
Our Commitment to Inclusion:
There are more than 50,000 engineering jobs:
Subscribe to membership and unlock all jobs
Engineering Jobs
60,000+ jobs from 4,500+ well-funded companies
Updated Daily
New jobs are added every day as companies post them
Refined Search
Use filters like skill, location, etc to narrow results
Become a member
🥳🥳🥳 452 happy customers and counting...
Overall, over 80% of customers chose to renew their subscriptions after the initial sign-up.
To try it out
For active job seekers
For those who are passive looking
Cancel anytime
Frequently Asked Questions
- We prioritize job seekers as our customers, unlike bigger job sites, by charging a small fee to provide them with curated access to the best companies and up-to-date jobs. This focus allows us to deliver a more personalized and effective job search experience.
- We've got over 200,000 jobs from 15,000+ vetted companies. No fake or sleazy jobs here!
- We aggregate jobs from 15,000+ companies' career pages, so you can be sure that you're getting the most up-to-date and relevant jobs.
- We're the only job board *for* software engineers, *by* software engineers… in case you needed a reminder! We add thousands of new jobs daily and offer powerful search filters just for you. 🛠️
- Every single hour! We add 2,000-3,000 new jobs daily, so you'll always have fresh opportunities. 🚀
- Typically, job searches take 3-6 months. EchoJobs helps you spend more time applying and less time hunting. 🎯
- Check daily! We're always updating with new jobs. Set up job alerts for even quicker access. 📅
What Fellow Engineers Say