[Remote] Sr. Manager, Machine Learning Engineering-Applied Research

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Pinterest is hiring a Senior Manager to lead its Applied Science recommendation system innovation team. The role sets technical strategy and roadmap, manages researchers and engineers, and moves machine learning research into production to improve core business metrics.

Responsibilities

• Technical Vision and Execution: Own the technical roadmap and strategic vision for Pinterest’s next-generation recommendation systems. Champion the use of state-of-the-art ML techniques to deliver revolutionary innovations in recommendation technology
• Team Leadership & People Management: Support, mentor, and grow a world-class team of Applied Scientists, Machine Learning Engineers, and technical leads. Recruit top talent, foster an inclusive research-to-production culture, and guide career progression
• Portfolio & Strategy Management: Balance execution across two parallel horizons—delivering near-term measurable metric improvements while sponsoring multi-quarter, high-risk/high-reward AI/ML research initiatives
• Research to Production: Successfully transition breakthrough ML research into production-ready systems that directly impact core company metrics
• Cross-functional Partnership: Collaborate seamlessly with Consumer Engineering, Ads Engineering, Platform, Content, and Data Science teams to prototype, build, and scale solutions to complex engineering challenges. Partner with leadership to deepen user understanding and set the strategic direction for our recommendation system roadmap

Skills

• 7+ years of combined post-graduate academic and industry experience applying state-of-the-art ML technologies to real-world problems on web-scale data
• 3+ years of direct people management experience
• A track record of delivering high-impact initiatives across multiple product areas, with a demonstrated ability to influence peers and leadership using data-driven insights
• Experience mentoring, coaching, and up-leveling software and machine learning engineers
• A self-propelled learner who stays ahead of industry trends, new tools, and emerging methodologies, with an appetite for building proof-of-concept prototypes
• The ability to transform vague, ambiguous questions into well-defined projects with clear success metrics that drive business decisions
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to distill complex technical findings for leadership and product teams, backed by a strong track record of publications in machine learning, AI, data science, or related technical fields
• MS/PhD in Computer Science, ML, NLP, Statistics, Information Sciences or related field
• Experience managing hybrid teams of research-oriented scientists and production-focused machine learning engineers
• Track record of publishing at top-tier ML/RecSys conferences (KDD, RecSys, NeurIPS, CVPR)
• Familiarity with generative AI for recommendations (e.g., semantic indexing, LLMs/GenRec architectures) or deep RL for long-term user value optimization
• Experience leveraging modern LLM/Agentic workflows and generative A

Benefits

• Eligible for equity
• This role can be situated anywhere in the country and requires in-office collaboration 1-2 times/quarter

Company Overview

Company H1B Sponsorship