Senior Staff Technical Program Manager, Search Signals
Pinterest · Remote · San Francisco, United States · 1mo ago
About Pinterest:
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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.
As a Sr. Staff Technical Program Manager for Search Signals at Pinterest, you will lead company-level programs that are foundational to Pinterest’s strategic transformation into a shopping and inspiration platform. This role is responsible for driving innovation and execution across offsite signals, content understanding, and relevance, with direct impact on multiple company OKRs. You will operate at the intersection of technical depth, cross-org influence, and long-term business strategy, shaping the future of search and personalization at Pinterest.
What you’ll do:
Strategic Leadership & Vision
- Envision and trailblaze the company’s approach to leveraging offsite and onsite signals, anticipating future business, technical, and regulatory challenges.
- Drive the creation and evolution of the company-wide roadmap for signals, aligning business objectives with technical capabilities and directly impacting multiple company OKRs.
- Identify opportunities for long-term business innovation and differentiation, ensuring Pinterest remains at the forefront of search and recommendation technologies.
Program Execution & Outcomes
- Oversee and deliver company-level programs that span multiple organizations, managing ambiguity and risk at scale.
- Lead the technical execution and delivery of signals initiatives, ensuring on-time, high-quality results across interconnected projects.
- Develop and achieve program-specific metrics and targets, driving the resolution of complex technical and program management challenges through conceptual and innovative thinking.
Influence & Cross-Org Leadership
- Influence at the VP/staff level, providing thought leadership in program and product management across Pinterest.
- Guide and motivate teams, fostering an environment of accountability, inclusion, and high performance.
- Serve as the primary liaison with AI Research teams and other partner organizations to accelerate the adoption of new models (LLMs, VLMs, recommender systems) and ensure seamless integration into core Pinterest experiences.
Collaboration & Communication
- Evangelize the vision and progress of signals programs to all levels of leadership, including the Executive Team, ensuring clear, concise, and impactful communication.
- Drive consensus and propose informed tradeoffs across the company, balancing technical, business, and regulatory considerations.
- Build and maintain strong relationships with internal and external stakeholders, including Product, Engineering, Legal, Privacy, and external data partners.
Technical & Domain Expertise
- Demonstrate expert technical understanding and judgment, guiding teams in solving complex technical challenges that span organizations.
- Author and advance best practices, tools, and methodologies for signals management, data acquisition, and model evaluation.
- Shape the future of the signals domain at Pinterest through continuous research, learning, and mentorship of program managers and technical leads.
AI-first execution & workflow design
- Use GenAI as the default operating model for TPM execution—starting from AI-assisted first drafts of core artifacts (charters, roadmaps, status reports, decision memos, RAID logs) and modernizing high-toil workflows (status synthesis, risk/dependency tracking, intake triage) into AI-first mechanisms where appropriate.
- Prototype lightweight AI-powered helpers and tools (“vibe coding”) to improve signal quality monitoring, experiment readouts, and decision-making across Search and Signals.
- Follow Pinterest AI guidance for risk, governance, and safety-by-design—appropriately handling sensitive data, validating AI-generated outputs, documenting assumptions/limits, and ensuring AI-assisted workflows meet applicable policy/compliance expectations before broad adoption.
What we’re looking for:
- BS in a technical discipline or equivalent experience (10+ years in technical or analytical roles, with significant program leadership at company scale).
- Demonstrated ability to lead transformational, company-level programs with direct impact on multiple OKRs.
- Deep technical breadth and judgment, with expertise in search, recommendation systems, ML/AI, and large-scale data integration.
- AI-forward execution mindset – demonstrated ability to use GenAI to accelerate planning, program operations, and stakeholder communications at company scale—starting from AI drafts and applying strong judgment to validate, refine, and drive decisions.
- Workflow design, AI fluency, and data orientation – experience turning repeatable program work into durable, low-toil mechanisms and improving decision quality using GenAI, data analysis, and automation (including “vibe-coding” small helpers or scripts with AI coding assistants).
- Safety-by-design AI fluency – experience operating within AI governance expectations (risk assessment, sensitive data handling, model/output validation, auditability/traceability) and proactively identifying where AI use is not appropriate or requires additional controls.
- Proven track record of influencing at the VP/staff level and driving consensus across complex, cross-functional environments.
- Exceptional communication, relationship-building, and organizational awareness.
- Experience with legal, privacy, and regulatory compliance in data-driven environments.
- Experience working with external data partners and negotiating data acquisition agreements is highly desirable.
- Experience with internationalization and supporting global product relevance is a plus
- Experience working with Search products at a low level of detail highly desirable
- Experience with data acquisition, integration, and management, especially for offsite signals, is a plus
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 let the type of work you do guide the collaboration style. That means we're not always working in an office, but we continue to gather for key moments of collaboration and connection.
- This role will need to be in the office for in-person collaboration 1-2 times/quarter and therefore can be situated anywhere in the country.
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At Pinterest we believe the workplace should be equitable, inclusive, and inspiring for every employee. In an effort to provide greater transparency, we are sharing the base salary range for this position. The position is also eligible for equity. Final salary is based on a number of factors including location, travel, relevant prior experience, or particular skills and expertise.
Information regarding the culture at Pinterest and benefits available for this position can be found here.
Our Commitment to Inclusion: