Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Pinterest is a platform that inspires creativity and innovation, and they are seeking a Sr. Software Engineer to enhance their simulation and AI capabilities. The role involves designing systems that model the CTV advertising ecosystem and developing AI-driven tools to improve how they build and test machine learning systems.
Responsibilities
- Design and build simulation environments that model CTV auction mechanics, inventory supply, and advertiser competition
- Develop counterfactual and what-if frameworks for evaluating bidding strategies, budget allocation, and pacing algorithms offline
- Build AI agents that explore strategy spaces, generate hypotheses, and automate experimentation within simulated environments
- Use simulation to de-risk ML model deployments — validate new bidding and optimization strategies before they touch live traffic
- Define the technical direction for simulation and AI infrastructure and mentor engineers on the team
Skills
- Systems programming experience in Zig or similar (C, C++, Rust)
- Deep understanding of probabilistic modeling, stochastic processes, or agent-based simulation
- Hands-on experience with modern AI tools: LLMs, code generation, agentic workflows — and good judgment about when they help vs. when they don't
- Adtech experience: you understand RTB mechanics, and the dynamics of programmatic advertising
- Ability to translate business questions ('what happens if we change our bid strategy?') into rigorous simulation frameworks
- Clear written communication: you'll be defining new technical directions and need to bring others along
- Ownership: you scope, design, and ship systems end-to-end with minimal direction
- Demonstrated ability to use AI to improve speed and quality in your day-to-day workflow for relevant outputs
- Strong track record of critical evaluation and verification of AI-assisted work (e.g., testing, source-checking, data validation, peer review)
- High integrity and ownership: you protect sensitive data, avoid over-reliance on AI, and remain accountable for final decisions and deliverables
- Bachelor's degree in computer science, machine learning, statistics, a related field or equivalent experience
- Strong production Python skills and experience building simulation or modeling systems
- Causal inference — uplift modeling, synthetic controls, difference-in-differences, or incrementality testing
- Experience with discrete event simulation, Monte Carlo methods, or digital twins
- Reinforcement learning — using simulated environments for policy learning and evaluation
- Experience building agentic AI systems or multi-agent simulations
- Big data experience with Scala and Spark
- MLOps experience — model deployment, monitoring, and pipeline orchestration on AWS
Benefits
- The position is also eligible for equity.
- Visit our PinFlex page to learn more about our working model.
- Information regarding the culture at Pinterest and benefits available for this position can be found here.
Company Overview