Manager of Technical Program Management, Pinterest
Ads & Core Infrastructure
$171.5-300.1k
+ equity
More information about location
Visual bookmarking tool for saving & discovering creative ideas
Open for applications
Visual bookmarking tool for saving & discovering creative ideas
1001+ employees
Open for applications
$171.5-300.1k
+ equity
More information about location
1001+ employees
Company mission
To bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love.
Role
Who you are
- Ads infrastructure experience, for real. You've worked inside an ads platform, indexing, serving, pipeline architecture, catalog systems, or API infrastructure at a company operating at scale. You know what scaling a product index to 1B+ items actually requires. You can have a technical conversation with a principal engineer about tradeoffs without needing a translator
- You've built execution systems where they didn't exist. You've come into a portfolio or team where the operating model was missing or broken, diagnosed it quickly, and built the structure that let teams move with confidence. You know how to establish the minimum viable execution system and iterate, you don't wait for perfect information to start
- Technical depth with cross-domain range. Your core is ads infrastructure or platform-scale data systems, but you ramp quickly into adjacent technical domains such as APIs, client platforms, reliability infrastructure and become credible there. Strong engineers trust your judgment even outside your primary background
- Senior stakeholder management. You communicate at VP level without preparation time. You frame tradeoffs, drive alignment, and surface risks in the same conversation. You're proactive, not reactive, and engineering leaders seek you out rather than tolerate you
- Execution discipline others can feel. When you're running a program, people know it. Milestones are real. Risks surface before they become incidents. You create a forcing function that makes teams better at delivery just by being in the room
- People leadership without losing hands-on credibility. You've managed TPMs and made them better set direction, coached on craft, created leverage without losing the ability to be the most rigorous person in the room on your highest-stakes programs
- AI-first operating instincts. You default to AI-assisted drafts, prompts, and lightweight tooling to accelerate your own work and reduce team toil. You apply strong judgment to validate outputs and know when AI use needs additional controls
- Experience translating strategy into executable multi-quarter roadmaps with clear milestones, dependencies, and measurable outcomes across multi-team portfolios
- Bachelors in a technical discipline, or equivalent experience (10+ years in a technical, program or analytical role)
- 5+ years experience in a technology people management role (engineering manager, product manager, program manager or technical consulting engagement manager)
What the job involves
- Pinterest is making a serious bet on performance advertising and delivering on that bet requires ads infrastructure operating at a fundamentally different scale than where it is today
- The Platforms TPM team partners with engineering leadership across Ads Infrastructure, Core Foundations, Quality Engineering, and Client Platforms to turn platform strategy into clear, executable programs that ship
- This role exists because Pinterest's Ads & Core Infrastructure portfolio: Shopping index scale-out, next-gen indexing pipelines, catalog unification, and API modernization needs a TPM Leader who has done this before
- Someone who can walk in, size up a complex portfolio, build the execution system it needs, and drive delivery with the kind of discipline that makes engineering leaders trust you with their hardest problems
- If you've built your career in ads infrastructure or platform-scale data systems and you're ready to own the operating model rather than inherit one, this is that role
- Own end-to-end TPM execution for Pinterest's Ads & Core Infrastructure portfolio: the primary focus of this role including Shopping index scale-out (300M → 1B+ items), next-generation indexing pipelines, catalog and ingestion unification, API modernization, and core infrastructure reliability programs
- Build the execution operating model for this portfolio from the ground up: milestones, RAID discipline, decision forums, escalation paths, and accountability structures that give engineering teams the clarity to move faster
- Partner with engineering leaders across Ads Infrastructure and Core Foundations to define program outcomes, sequence workstreams, manage cross-team dependencies, and drive delivery against multi-quarter goals
- Manage and develop a small team of TPMs across Ads & Core Infra, Quality Engineering, and Client Foundations: setting direction, coaching on execution craft, and creating leverage while staying hands-on with the highest-complexity programs yourself
- Provide senior leadership coverage and strategic judgment for Quality Engineering and Client Foundations programs, where experienced TPMs are already executing day-to-day
- Build and run integrated operating cadences across the portfolio: roadmap planning, milestone reviews, dependency tracking, status reporting, and escalation paths to Platforms and EPD leadership
- Use GenAI as the default operating model for program execution: AI-assisted program artifacts, status synthesis, risk and dependency tracking, and stakeholder communications and prototype lightweight dashboards or workflow tools using AI coding assistants to reduce toil across the portfolio
- Surface risks, tradeoffs, and escalation paths proactively to senior engineering and EPD leadership: before they become incidents
- Apply Pinterest's AI governance and safety-by-design standards: handle sensitive data appropriately, validate AI-generated outputs, and ensure AI-assisted workflows meet applicable policy and compliance expectations
Our take
Inspiration and ideas can pop into your head at any time, and with the growth of social media and networking, sharing these interests and gaining exposure has never been easier. Pinterest exists to display these moments visually, as a kind of digital pinboard allowing users to save and share digital images which have inspired them.
Pinterest's emphasis on visual discovery has differentiated it from competitors and created a more positive and fulfilling experience for its users. Pinterest in many ways provides a respite from the ceaseless negativity that plagues social media such as Facebook and X, and this is perhaps responsible for its userbase expanding to 600M by late 2025.
With this type of success, Pinterest's future feels full of possibility. Recent industry chatter suggests that OpenAI may be eyeing the platform, which has sparked exciement for some and concern for others. While nothing is confirmed, the discussion highlights just how valuable Pinterest has become. Whether through potential partnerships or continues independent growth, Pinterest is very much going to keep on innovation and growing.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
9% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Company HQ
SoMa, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Bill Ready
(CEO)Prior to joining Pinterest in 2022, Bill was the President of Commerce, Payments & Emerging Markets at Google.
Salary benchmarks
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