Senior Staff Software Engineer, Configuration & Coordination

Description

About Pinterest:

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.

Discover a career where you ignite innovation for millions, transform passion into growth opportunities, celebrate each other’s unique experiences and embrace the flexibility to do your best work. Creating a career you love? It’s Possible.

At Pinterest, AI isn't just a feature, it's a powerful partner that augments our creativity and amplifies our impact, and we’re looking for candidates who are excited to be a part of that. To get a complete picture of your experience and abilities, we’ll explore your foundational skills and how you collaborate with AI.

Through our interview process, what matters most is that you can always explain your approach, showing us not just what you know, but how you think. You can read more about our AI interview philosophy and how we use AI in our recruiting process here.

Intro: Pinterest’s Service Configuration & Coordination team builds the platforms, APIs, and tooling that make dynamic configuration and service coordination safe, scalable, and reliable for every service across regions and clouds, serving as the central hub for cross-functional alignment and system orchestration. As a Senior Staff Software Engineer (IC17), you’ll own the end-to-end technical strategy and long-term vision for our configuration and coordination infrastructure. You’ll define the future of these mission-critical systems, partnering closely with Traffic, Compute, Observability, and Cloud Architecture teams to deliver robust, high-performance solutions at scale.

What you’ll do:

• Orchestrate the long-term technical vision for configuration ecosystems to ensure feature flags, ML settings, and experiments utilize unified paved paths. You will champion operational safety through standardized validation, staged rollout mechanisms, and robust governance frameworks across the organization.
• Spearhead the transition from legacy substrates by migrating mission-critical use cases to modern platforms. You will establish scalable onboarding patterns that enable engineering teams to evolve their configuration lifecycle with precision and minimal friction.
• Architect the next generation of control plane interfaces and diagnostic surfaces. By engineering high-performance, read-optimized APIs, you will empower human operators and automated assistants to seamlessly manage and reason about complex production states.
• Direct the integration of coordination stacks within the broader deployment and multi-region landscape. Your leadership will refine service discovery and substrate architecture to accelerate regional expansion while eliminating bespoke toil and architectural circularity.
• Leverage AI to catalyze infrastructure design and analytical phases, utilizing assistant-enabled workflows to synthesize partner requirements into executable roadmaps. You will maintain absolute accountability through rigorous data validation, metric-driven reviews, and comprehensive peer verification.

What we’re looking for:

• Decade-plus mastery in high-scale infrastructure and distributed environments, with a track record of architecting or managing business-critical backend substrates in production settings.
• Proven expertise in orchestrating cross-functional technical strategies for control-plane systems (e.g., experiments, feature flags, or ML config), unifying disparate teams around standardized and safe rollout methodologies.
• Advanced proficiency in distributed coordination and substrate design—capable of navigating complex consistency models, failure domains, and the engineering of resilient, high-leverage abstractions.
• Experience aligning configuration surfaces with deployment pipelines and orchestration frameworks (e.g., IaC or CI/CD), with a focus on mitigating architectural circularity and reducing service owner toil.
• History of elevating senior engineering talent while steering parallel workstreams, synthesizing loosely coupled initiatives into a unified technical vision and executable roadmap.
• Ability to catalyze execution via AI-enabled workflows (e.g., design synthesis, analytical phases, or documentation) while ensuring rigorous accountability through data validation, peer review, and metric-driven verification.
• Extreme ownership and professional integrity: dedicated to safeguarding data, maintaining human-in-the-loop oversight for automated outputs, and taking full responsibility for long-term architectural outcomes.
• Bachelor’s/Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.

Relocation Statement:

• This position is not eligible for relocation assistance. Visit our PinFlex page to learn more about our working model.

In-Office Requirement Statement:

• We recognize that the ideal environment for work is situational and may differ across departments. What this looks like day-to-day can vary based on the needs of each organization or role.
• This role will need to be in the office for in-person collaboration 1-2 times every 6-months and therefore can be situated anywhere in the country.

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