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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.
The Storage Services team operates Pinterest's scalable online structured data storage platform—supporting both SQL-based table models and complex graph data structures—managing 100TB+ datasets and serving over 1.5M queries per second across many of Pinterest's most important products. We're looking for an exceptional Staff Software Engineer to lead the technical strategy and execution of our storage infrastructure initiatives, defining how these systems are designed, built, and operated. You'll drive innovation across distributed SQL, high-throughput/low-latency query processing, graph workloads, and the developer experience for storage clients.
What you’ll do:
- Provide technical guidance and direction to a high-performing team building reliable, performant, and cost-efficient storage systems that operate at massive scale and power business-critical applications across the company.
- Lead the architecture, design, and evolution of online structured storage services supporting both SQL/table-style and graph-style workloads over large-scale datasets.
- Drive cross-functional strategic initiatives to modernize the storage tech stack—including transitioning datasets and workloads onto the TiDB backend—while advancing reliability, scalability, cost efficiency, and developer velocity.
- Improve query throughput and latency across systems handling 100TB+ datasets and 1.5M+ queries per second, using rigorous measurement, experimentation, and performance engineering.
- Use AI to accelerate system design and decision-making—prototyping approaches, exploring and comparing architectural options, and synthesizing findings—while applying judgment and verification to ensure correctness and quality.
- Use AI to automate repeatable operational work (documentation, runbooks, reporting, and QA checks), freeing the team to focus on high-leverage engineering.
- Serve on the Storage Services on-call rotation—monitoring, responding to alerts, diagnosing and resolving critical issues, and communicating status—and set the bar for technical excellence through strong design reviews, operational readiness, and blameless post-incident reviews.
- Mentor senior engineers, developing the next generation of storage infrastructure leaders and technical experts.
What we’re looking for:
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, a related field or equivalent experience.
- 8+ years of hands-on backend software engineering experience in large-scale distributed systems.
- Experience building and/or managing core infrastructure systems at scale, preferably in online structured data storage, distributed databases, or large-scale data platforms.
- Hands-on experience building and operating highly available, reliable, production-grade systems at scale, including incident response, capacity planning, schema/architecture evolution, and performance tuning.
- Strong understanding of at least one of:
- Distributed SQL or NoSQL databases and their internals (e.g., sharding, replication, consensus, transaction processing), or
- Large-scale graph or relationship-oriented data stores and query patterns.
- Experience working with or migrating to modern distributed storage/database technologies (experience with systems like TiDB or similar is a strong plus).
- Demonstrated technical leadership in setting roadmap and driving execution — including defining technical direction, leading engineering alignment, and partnering across teams to deliver complex platform investments.
- Strong problem-solving skills and analytical mindset, with the ability to use data to guide decisions.
- Experience coding in one of the following languages: Java, Python and/or C/C++.
- Demonstrated experience leveraging AI to accelerate development, enhance operations, and improve customer support.
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 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.
- This role will need to be in the office for in-person collaboration 1-2 times/month and therefore can be situated anywhere in the country.
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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:
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