About the company
Millions of people around the world come to our platform to find creative ideas, dream about new possibilities and plan for memories that will last a lifetime. At Pinterest, we’re on a mission to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love, and that starts with the people behind the product.
Responsibilities
- Provide technical guidance and direction to a high-performing team building reliable, performant, and cost-efficient storage systems that operate at massive scale and power business-critical applications across the company.
- Lead the architecture, design, and evolution of online structured storage services supporting both SQL/table-style and graph-style workloads over large-scale datasets.
- Drive cross-functional strategic initiatives to modernize the storage tech stack—including transitioning datasets and workloads onto the TiDB backend—while advancing reliability, scalability, cost efficiency, and developer velocity.
- Improve query throughput and latency across systems handling 100TB+ datasets and 1.5M+ queries per second, using rigorous measurement, experimentation, and performance engineering.
- Use AI to accelerate system design and decision-making—prototyping approaches, exploring and comparing architectural options, and synthesizing findings—while applying judgment and verification to ensure correctness and quality.
- Use AI to automate repeatable operational work (documentation, runbooks, reporting, and QA checks), freeing the team to focus on high-leverage engineering.
- Serve on the Storage Services on-call rotation—monitoring, responding to alerts, diagnosing and resolving critical issues, and communicating status—and set the bar for technical excellence through strong design reviews, operational readiness, and blameless post-incident reviews.
- Mentor senior engineers, developing the next generation of storage infrastructure leaders and technical experts.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, a related field or equivalent experience.
- 8+ years of hands-on backend software engineering experience in large-scale distributed systems.
- Experience building and/or managing core infrastructure systems at scale, preferably in online structured data storage, distributed databases, or large-scale data platforms.
- Hands-on experience building and operating highly available, reliable, production-grade systems at scale, including incident response, capacity planning, schema/architecture evolution, and performance tuning.
- Strong understanding of at least one of: Distributed SQL or NoSQL databases and their internals (e.g., sharding, replication, consensus, transaction processing), or Large-scale graph or relationship-oriented data stores and query patterns.
- Experience working with or migrating to modern distributed storage/database technologies (experience with systems like TiDB or similar is a strong plus).
- Demonstrated technical leadership in setting roadmap and driving execution — including defining technical direction, leading engineering alignment, and partnering across teams to deliver complex platform investments.
- Strong problem-solving skills and analytical mindset, with the ability to use data to guide decisions.
- Experience coding in one of the following languages: Java, Python and/or C/C++.
- Demonstrated experience leveraging AI to accelerate development, enhance operations, and improve customer support.
Conditions
- This position is not eligible for relocation assistance.
- This role will need to be in the office for in-person collaboration 1-2 times/month and therefore can be situated anywhere in the country.