Staff software engineer, capacity 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 a Staff Software Engineer, Capacity Engineering. The team is responsible for efficiently managing one of the largest-scale cloud-native infrastructures in the world. This role is highly impactful, as efficiency is an ongoing strategic priority for Pinterest. The role has direct visibility across Pinterest Engineering and with Engineering and company leadership.

The team is looking for a candidate with a strong background in implementing performance and efficiency projects on large scale distributed systems.

What you’ll do:

• Improve the efficiency of large scale shared environments like Kubernetes
• Improve the performance and efficiency of large scale distributed systems that drive Pinterest systems
• Build develop and mature profiling and optimization capabilities for Pinterest scale
• Collaborate with Infrastructure Engineering and SRE teams in their mission to deliver highly available, resilient, secure and efficient foundations for Pinterest’s tech stack
• Leverage AI to scale the impact of yourself and the team, including:
• Accelerate performance investigations (e.g. quickly distill logs/metrics/traces and prior learnings) while verifying findings through measurement and testing
• Build tooling and agents that allow users to self-serve efficiency insights and recommendations
• Iterate faster on optimization approaches and rollout plans, then validate impact with experiments and production guardrails

What we’re looking for:

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, a related field or equivalent experience
• Deep understanding of infrastructure capacity and performance
• Experience leading efficiency initiatives at scale on Kubernetes or other large scale shared infrastructure
• Strong technical and performance engineering skills to collaborate with stakeholders on complex and ambiguous technical challenges
• Experience building and managing highly available distributed applications at scale
• Proficiency in software development languages such as Java, Python and C++
• Excellent skills in communicating complex technical issues
• Experience with AWS or similar cloud environments
• Demonstrated ability to use AI to improve speed and quality in your day-to-day workflow for relevant outputs
• Strong track record of critical evaluation and verification of AI-assisted work (e.g., testing, source-checking, data validation, peer review)
• High integrity and ownership: you protect sensitive data, avoid over-reliance on AI, and remain accountable for final decisions and deliverables

Bonus points for the following:

• Hands-on experience with large, cloud-native multi-tenant platforms at Internet scale

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/month and therefore can be situated anywhere in the country.

Relocation Statement: This position is not eligible for relocation assistance. Visit our PinFlex page to learn more about our working model. #LI-REMOTE #LI-JT1