Pinterest is on a mission to inspire creativity and help people plan memorable experiences. The Staff Software Engineer will lead the technical roadmap for the performance marketing platform, focusing on systems that optimize marketing spend and drive user growth across various channels.
Responsibilities:
- Lead the technical roadmap for the performance marketing platform, defining the highest-impact investments across attribution, bidding, budget optimization, and campaign management
- Drive hands-on engineering across ad platform integrations, event pipelines, and production systems that deploy and measure marketing spend
- Design and evolve the measurement stack — attribution models, conversion signal collection, incrementality methodology, and privacy-resilient approaches as platform signals degrade
- Develop systems that automate and optimize bidding strategies and campaign experimentation at scale
- Drive cross-team technical initiatives with ads platform, data warehouse, and mobile teams — authoring design documents and building alignment across engineering orgs
- Own system reliability and operational health for spend-critical systems where downtime or bugs have direct financial impact
- Collaborate with marketing, data science, and product partners to identify growth opportunities and turn them into engineered solutions
- Mentor and develop engineers on the team, establishing technical best practices and raising the bar on system design
- Use AI to accelerate your own work—across exploration, drafting, analysis, and synthesis—while maintaining strong judgment, rigorous validation, and accountability for outcomes
Requirements:
- 7+ years of experience building and shipping backend systems, with hands-on experience supporting performance marketing
- Strong understanding of paid media platforms — Google Ads, Meta, TikTok, Snap, or similar — and the operational realities of integrating with their APIs at scale
- Deep understanding of attribution methodologies (last click, multi-touch, SKAN, probabilistic vs. deterministic), incrementality testing, and conversion optimization, with hands-on experience integrating mobile measurement partners (AppsFlyer, Adjust, Singular, or similar) across mobile clients and server-side APIs
- Experience with near real-time systems for bidding, budget optimization, and conversion event delivery — you understand the mechanics well enough to evolve existing systems and propose improvements
- Strong proficiency building and operating data pipelines and services using Python or Java/Scala, plus SQL; experience with modern big data ecosystems is a plus
- Strong systems design skills across distributed systems, event-driven architectures, and service-oriented backends
- Familiarity with ML infrastructure concepts and ability to build systems that support ML workloads
- Demonstrated ability to use AI to accelerate your workflow while maintaining high standards for verification, data integrity, and ownership of final outputs
- Bachelor's degree in a relevant field such as Computer Science, or equivalent experience