About the role

This position will drive the evolution of merchant and shopping experiences on Pinterest through advanced AI and machine learning. You will build systems that identify, understand, and present high-quality merchants, enhancing discovery for users and expanding reach for businesses. This role is central to improving user trust and shopping outcomes.

Key facts

- Location: Toronto, ON, CA, Remote, Canada
- Engagement: Regular
- Team: Merchant

What you'll do
- Take ownership of the complete technical delivery for initiatives, from initial concept and strategy to implementation, deployment, and ongoing refinement.
- Define the technical strategy and execution plans in collaboration with leadership and cross-functional partners, establishing project timelines and quality standards.
- Develop and enhance machine learning and generative AI systems to improve merchant understanding and quality, impacting areas like content enrichment, entity resolution, and quality signals.
- Implement rigorous evaluation and measurement frameworks for ML and LLM systems, including data strategy, human review processes, automated testing, and metric alignment.
- Design systems with a focus on performance, reliability, scalability, and safety, incorporating necessary safeguards and monitoring for production environments.
- Establish operational standards for machine learning engineering within the team, covering evaluation, launch readiness, monitoring, and sustainable practices.
- Collaborate with Product, Engineering, Data Science, Design, and Legal teams to align on goals, define requirements, and deliver ML solutions.
- Lead experimentation, analyze errors, and translate insights into tangible improvements for user trust and shopping results.
- Mentor team members on technical design, evaluation rigor, and production readiness to foster efficient and protected AI/ML development.
- Contribute to scaling the team by assisting with hiring and onboarding processes.

Requirements




- A minimum of 8 years of professional experience in machine learning engineering, applied machine learning, or software engineering, with significant experience at a Staff-level or equivalent, delivering complex production systems.
- Proven ability to lead new machine learning or LLM initiatives from inception to production, defining approaches for ambiguous problems and achieving measurable impact.
- A strong history of successfully deploying machine learning-powered systems in areas such as recommendations, ranking, retrieval, content understanding, advertising relevance, or e-commerce.
- Practical experience building and deploying LLM-powered applications or similar generative AI systems, with a solid understanding of their reliability, failure modes, and deployment safety.
- Extensive experience with evaluation and measurement methodologies, including dataset strategy, labeling operations, metric design, regression testing, and linking offline performance to online results.
- Proficient in designing data-intensive and machine learning systems, capable of balancing performance, reliability, scalability, and cost.
- Excellent communication and influencing skills to guide technical direction across teams.
- Demonstrated success in building and strengthening partnerships with other teams and organizations.
- A Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice to have
- Experience with agentic workflows, measurement, and operational rigor for merchant and business integrity.
- Familiarity with merchant and brand affinity modeling.

Skills & tools
- Machine Learning
- Generative AI
- LLMs
- Recommendation Systems
- Ranking Systems
- Retrieval Systems
- Content Understanding
- E-commerce
- Systems Design

Practical notes
- This role requires being in the office once per week for in-person collaboration and must be within commuting distance of the Toronto office.
- This position is not eligible for relocation assistance.
- Canada based applicants only: Base salary range is $213,180 to $314,160 CAD.

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📌 Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Merchants (Toronto)
🏢 Pinterest
📍 Toronto