Staff Software Engineer, Pinterest
Observability
$177.2-364.8k
+ Equity
More information about location
Visual bookmarking tool for saving & discovering creative ideas
Be an early applicant
Visual bookmarking tool for saving & discovering creative ideas
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$177.2-364.8k
+ Equity
More information about location
1001+ employees
Company mission
To bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love.
Role
Who you are
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience
- Product Mindset: Demonstrated ability to work backwards from customer needs —understanding user needs, prioritizing features, measuring success, and iterating based on feedback
- Experience building internal platforms or tools with strong adoption
- Distributed Systems Expertise: 7+ years of experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems with deep understanding of consistency, availability, scalability, and failure modes
- Data Engineering Skills: Strong background in building data pipelines, working with time-series databases, columnar storage, stream processing (Kafka, Flink, etc.), and data modeling at scale
- Observability Domain Knowledge: Hands-on experience with modern observability tools and practices including metrics, logging, tracing, and profiling
- Familiarity with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, or similar technologies
- Programming Proficiency: Expert-level coding skills in languages like Java, Python, Go, or Scala with ability to write production-quality code
- Systems Thinking: Ability to see the big picture while managing complex technical details, balancing trade-offs between cost, performance, and reliability
- Experience building observability platforms from the ground up or significantly scaling existing solutions
- Familiarity with cloud-native architectures and technologies (Kubernetes, service mesh, etc.)
- Track record of driving adoption of internal platforms through excellent documentation, UX, and developer advocacy
- Experience with machine learning or anomaly detection applied to observability use cases
- Strong communication skills with ability to influence stakeholders at all levels
- Contributions to open-source observability projects, a plus
What the job involves
- We're seeking an exceptional Staff Software Engineer to join our Observability team at Pinterest
- This role combines deep technical expertise in distributed systems and data engineering with a product-oriented mindset to build world-class observability solutions that empower our engineering organization
- As a Staff Engineer on the Observability team, you'll be responsible for designing and building the infrastructure and tools that provide visibility into Pinterest's large-scale distributed systems, helping thousands of engineers understand, debug, and optimize their services
- Define and execute the observability roadmap, treating it as a product. Understand engineering team needs and translate them into technical solutions with measurable impact
- Architect, build, and scale distributed observability infrastructure (metrics, logs, traces) to handle massive volumes across Pinterest's distributed systems
- Build high-performance data pipelines and storage for real-time and historical telemetry analysis at Pinterest scale
- Champion Best Practices: Establish observability standards and patterns across the organization, making it easy for teams to instrument their services and gain actionable insights
- Technical Leadership: Mentor engineers, lead architectural reviews, and influence technical decisions across teams to improve overall system reliability and performance
- Cross-functional Collaboration: Partner with SRE, Infrastructure, Product Engineering, and other teams to understand pain points and deliver solutions that improve developer productivity and system reliability
- Innovation: Stay current with observability trends and technologies, evaluating and adopting cutting-edge tools and techniques to keep Pinterest at the forefront
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.
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