Principal Engineer, Agentic Engineering

Pinterest is at one of those rare inflection points that comes along once in a generation. The way software gets built is changing fundamentally — AI agents are beginning to write code, review pull requests, debug production incidents, and orchestrate entire features. Pinterest is not watching this transformation from the sideline. We are choosing to lead it.

We are looking for a Principal Engineer to serve as a technical force multiplier for our Engineering Acceleration organization — a team of 60–80 engineers whose mission is to 10x how fast, and how well, every engineer at Pinterest builds. This is a startup-within-a-company opportunity: the charter is ambitious, the problems are largely unsolved, and the systems you build will define how an entire engineering organization operates for years.

As Principal Engineer for Agentic Engineering, you will architect and ship the foundational platform and capabilities that enables AI agents to operate as integrated participants in Pinterest's software development lifecycle. You will design the agent runtimes, memory systems, orchestration frameworks, evaluation pipelines, and governance models that make it possible for 3,000+ engineers to build alongside AI agents — safely, measurably, and at scale.

This is not a strategy-only or governance-only role. Architecture authority here is earned through production systems, measurable impact, and technical depth. You will write code. You will build reference implementations. You will take the hardest, most ambiguous problems and move them from concepts to operational systems — and in doing so, set the standard for how Engineering Acceleration builds.

You will work without a direct reporting team but with broad organizational authority. The Senior Director of Engineering Acceleration, VP of Engineering, and Chief Architect will look to you as a key technical advisor — a trusted partner and primary delegation point for the hardest technical questions facing this organization. Your instincts will shape hiring bars, investment decisions, and multi-year technical direction.

What you’ll do:

• Define and drive Pinterest's technical strategy for agentic engineering — building the platform where AI agents write code, review pull requests, debug production incidents, and orchestrate development workflows across 3,000+ engineers
• Architect and ship production systems — modular agent runtimes, persistent memory, multi-agent orchestration (planner, executor, reviewer, tool agents), sandbox isolation, evaluation pipelines, governance (trust boundaries, code generation policies, credential protection, audit trails), and enterprise-grade security
• Reimagine Pinterest's SDLC — transforming coding, testing, reviewing, deploying, and monitoring into an AI-native lifecycle where humans move from "in the loop" to "on the loop"
• Own developer velocity measurement — telemetry, benchmarking, and evaluation systems that track agent quality, reliability, cost, and engineering throughput, building structured feedback loops that compound toward order-of-magnitude velocity gains
• Serve as technical force multiplier across Platform, Infrastructure, and Engineering Acceleration — integrating AI-native workflows with Pinterest's monorepo tooling, CI/CD pipelines, observability, and code quality systems while providing architectural direction, making disciplined build-vs-buy decisions, and setting quality standards through reference implementations
• Drive engineering-wide adoption — through compelling prototypes, reference architectures, technical evangelism, and documentation that makes the abstract concrete
• Build strategic relationships with AI platform vendors — such as Anthropic, OpenAI, AWS, Google and contribute to open-source agentic frameworks to keep Pinterest at the leading edge
• Translate ambiguous business opportunities into precise engineering investments with strong product sensibility — building platforms with the developer experience and adoption characteristics that generate real impact
• Serve as key technical advisor and delegation point — working with the Sr. Director, Engineering Acceleration, VP, Infrastructure, and Chief Architect — shaping investment priorities and multi-year technical direction
  
  

What we’re looking for:

• 12+ years of software engineering experience with deep expertise in building developer platforms, internal tooling, or engineering infrastructure that measurably changed how engineers work at scale
• Demonstrated hands-on experience designing and shipping agentic AI systems in production — including knowledge and context engineering, persistent memory architectures, multi-agent orchestration frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph), tool integration, and production observability for AI systems
• Experience working in large-scale monorepos or complex multi-service codebases and understanding the unique tooling, navigation, and developer workflow challenges they create
• Familiarity with agentic development best practices — AGENTS.md conventions, skills frameworks, prompt engineering for code agents, and hands-on experience accelerating developer velocity through AI-powered IDEs and local agentic workflows
• Track record of driving sweeping technical change across large engineering organizations (500+ engineers) without direct authority — through compelling vision, high-quality reference implementations, and credibility earned from shipping systems that work
• Deep understanding of modern SDLC tooling and workflows: code review systems, automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, static analysis, and the judgment to know how these systems must evolve when AI becomes a first-class participant
• Exceptional cross-functional influence and communication skills — comfortable operating across Security, Infrastructure, Platform, and Product Engineering. Able to handle complex technical conversations at any level, from staff engineers to CTO
• Strong product sensibility and business judgment — ability to convert ambiguous opportunities into precise technical direction, understand developer needs before they're articulated, and build platforms that developers want to adopt
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field or equivalent experience

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 recognize that the ideal environment for work is situational and may differ across departments. What this looks like day-to-day can vary based on the needs of each organization or role.
• This role will need to be in the office for in-person collaboration 1-2 times every 6-months and therefore can be situated anywhere in the country.

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