Principal Engineer

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.

Pinterest operates at a massive scale, serving 500+ million users globally with billions of requests daily. Our Cloud Platform team owns the foundational infrastructure technology that powers Pinterest's entire ecosystem. We're building PinCompute, our next-generation Kubernetes-based platform that will eventually run all of Pinterest's workloads and services. This platform represents a multi-year transformation of how we build, deploy, and operate services at Pinterest scale.

We're looking for a Principal Software Engineer to architect the future of Pinterest's cloud infrastructure. You'll lead the technical vision for PinCompute, our Kubernetes-based platform that powers Pinterest's engineering ecosystem. This role demands a senior technical leader who can design and implement cloud infrastructure at massive scale while maintaining the reliability that millions of Pinners depend on daily.

What you'll do:

• Define and execute the multi-year technical strategy for Pinterest's cloud platform, architecting solutions that support 200+ engineering teams and billions of daily requests.
• Lead the evolution of our unified compute platform, driving architectural decisions that improve scalability, reliability, and developer productivity by orders of magnitude.
• Design and implement cloud-native infrastructure patterns that reduce operational complexity while increasing system resilience across thousands of microservices.
• Partner with AWS and other cloud providers to evaluate and adopt cutting-edge technologies, influencing our infrastructure roadmap and cost optimization strategies.
• Build frameworks and abstractions that simplify Kubernetes adoption for product teams, reducing cognitive load while maintaining flexibility for advanced use cases.
• Drive technical initiatives that modernize our container orchestration, service mesh, and cloud runtime systems to meet Pinterest's growing scale requirements.
• Mentor Staff and Senior Staff engineers across the organization, building the next generation of infrastructure leaders.
• Establish infrastructure standards and best practices that become the foundation for Pinterest's technical excellence across all engineering teams.

What we're looking for:

• BS (or higher) degree in Computer Science or related field.
• 12+ years of experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production environments.
• Expertise with multi-tenant cluster orchestration systems such as Kubernetes, container orchestration, and cloud-native architectures is beneficial.
• A proven track record of designing and operating systems utilizing large clusters serving millions of users.
• Experience with cloud platforms, including compute, networking, storage, and security services at scale.
• Strong background in container technologies, service mesh architectures and cloud-native observability.
• Proven ability to lead complex, multi-year infrastructure transformations that fundamentally improve engineering velocity and system reliability.
• Experience building internal developer platforms that abstract infrastructure complexity while maintaining operational excellence.
• Beneficial is experience with partnering with cloud vendors and influencing product roadmaps based on large-scale production requirements.
• Expertise in infrastructure-as-code, GitOps, and modern deployment strategies for zero-downtime releases.
• Strong systems programming skills in C++, Go, Java or similar languages.

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 per week and therefore needs to be in a commutable distance from one of the following offices: Zurich.

#LI-HYBRID

#LI-JD1