Staff Data Scientist, Engagement Ecosystem

Pinterest • San Francisco, CA

2d • Hybrid

About The Position

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.
We are looking for a Staff Data Scientist for our Engagement Ecosystem. You will shape the future of people-facing and business-facing products we build at Pinterest. Your expertise in quantitative modeling, experimentation and algorithms will be utilized to solve some of the most complex engineering challenges at the company. You will collaborate on a wide array of product and business problems with a diverse set of cross-functional partners across Product, Engineering, Design, Research, Product Analytics, Data Engineering and others. The results of your work will influence and uplevel our product development teams while introducing greater scientific rigor into the real world products serving hundreds of millions of pinners, creators, advertisers and merchants around the world.

Requirements

• 10+ years of hands-on experience in web-scale data environments, with a track record of solving hard, ambiguous problems in product, engagement, or ecosystem analytics.
• Deep expertise in: Machine Learning (recommendation, ranking, prediction, experimentation), Statistical Modeling & Causal Inference (observational and experimental data), Product analytics/strategy (beyond dashboards: root cause, goaling, design collaboration), Programming in Python/R and advanced SQL/Spark.
• Strong product intuition—ability to scope, question, and design the right solutions for ill-defined, high-impact business problems.
• Scientific rigor and healthy skepticism: You challenge assumptions, find flaws, and drive towards robust, reproducible outcomes.
• Exceptional communication: You make the complex simple, and can influence both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Track record mentoring and growing data talent at the staff/senior IC level.
• Cross-functional leadership and the ability to align competing interests towards shared goals.
• Masters degree in a technical field (e.g., Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Engineering, Social Sciences).

Responsibilities

• Develop a deep, nuanced understanding of the Pinterest engagement ecosystem and key product surfaces, quantifying ecosystem-level opportunities and risks.
• Lead projects on: Tradeoffs between organic engagement and advertising.
• Deep dives on how engagement metrics impact monetization and retention.
• Understanding and predicting the value of core behaviors (e.g., saving, repinning, board creation) as they relate to downstream business outcomes.
• Designing and evaluating interventions that sustainably boost enterprise metrics across product boundaries.
• Design and productionize robust, scalable ML and evaluation frameworks—spanning forecasting, recommendation, and causal inference.
• Advocate for best-in-class experimentation, instrumentation, and metric design; bridge the gap between short-term proxy metrics and long-term business impact.
• Collaborate across disciplines—Product, Engineering, Research, Business, and Design—translating complex data questions into actionable business insights.
• Mentor and guide junior and senior scientists, fostering intellectual curiosity and driving technical excellence.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level