Sr. Machine Learning Engineer, Applied Science

Pinterest Pinterest · Consumer · San Francisco, CA · Engineering, Product and Design (L2)

This role focuses on developing and shipping foundation ML models, specifically a text-to-image generative model called Pinterest Canvas. The responsibilities include prototyping new model architectures, contributing to visual generative strategy, collecting training data for RLHF and fine-tuning, and publishing research. The role requires experience with generative computer vision models, particularly diffusion models, and a strong academic background.

What you'd actually do

  1. Prototype new model architectures for Pinterest Canvas, our internal text-to-image generative model. We’re looking for hands-on experience working with diffusion text-to-image models and independent model implementation skills.
  2. Read research papers, participate in group discussions, and help brainstorm our overall visual generative strategy at the company.
  3. Help with collection of relevant visual training data for Pinterest Canvas, particularly to conduct RLHF, targeted fine-tuning, etc.
  4. Publish and publicize your work via conferences, paper submissions, blog posts, etc.
  5. Mentor more junior researchers or research interns within the Pinterest Labs organization.

Skills

Required

  • experience working with generative computer vision models
  • experience working with diffusion models
  • 5+ years of industry computer vision experience
  • M.S. or PhD in Machine Learning, Computer Science, or related areas

Nice to have

  • Publications at top ML conferences
  • Experience using Cursor, Copilot, Codex, or similar AI coding assistants for development, debugging, testing, and refactoring.
  • Familiarity with LLM-powered productivity tools for documentation search, experiment analysis, SQL/data exploration, and engineering workflow acceleration.

What the JD emphasized

  • hands-on experience working with diffusion text-to-image models
  • independent model implementation skills
  • M.S. or PhD in Machine Learning, Computer Science, or related areas

Other signals

  • develop foundation ML models
  • build large-scale generative models
  • shipped to production
  • multimodal text & image embeddings
  • text-to-image model