Staff Software Engineer- Growth Performance Marketing

Remote from: USA
Salary, yearly, USD: 177,185 - 364,795
Department: Software Engineering
Employment type: Full Time,
Job posted: 2 Jun 2026
Apply before: 2 Jul 2026
Experience level: Senior
Views / Applies: 10 / 2

About company

About Pinterest

Bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love.

Internet
2010

Actively Hiring

AI Summary

This Staff Software Engineer role at Pinterest focuses on growth performance marketing, designing systems for attribution, bidding, budget optimization, and campaign management across major ad platforms. The position leads technical roadmap definition, hands-on engineering for ad platform integrations, and evolution of measurement stacks resilient to privacy changes. It requires deep expertise in paid media platforms, attribution methodologies, and near real-time systems, along with strong backend engineering skills. The role offers a competitive salary range of $177,185 to $364,795 annually, reflecting seniority and impact.

Role DNA

Job Complexity

Easy Hard

Pace & Pressure

Relaxed Fast-paced

Autonomy Level

Guided Full Ownership

Communication Load

Independent Highly Collaborative

AI Insight The role demands 7+ years of experience, deep technical expertise in performance marketing systems, and cross-team leadership, making it highly challenging.

Salary Analysis

AI Insight The offered salary range of $177,185 to $364,795 is competitive for a Staff Software Engineer in performance marketing, aligning with top-tier tech companies. The median of $270,990 is above market average for this senior role.

Key Skills

Performance Marketing Backend Engineering Attribution Modeling Bidding Optimization Ad Platform Integration Python Java Big Data Distributed Systems Mentoring

Cover Letter Sample

I am excited to apply for the Staff Software Engineer role on the Growth Performance Marketing team at Pinterest. With over 7 years of experience building scalable backend systems and deep expertise in paid media platforms like Google Ads and Meta, I am confident in my ability to drive the technical roadmap for your performance marketing platform.

My background includes designing attribution models, integrating mobile measurement partners, and optimizing bidding strategies at scale. I have hands-on experience with near real-time systems and event-driven architectures, which aligns with the requirements for this role.

I am particularly drawn to Pinterest's mission of bringing inspiration to users and the opportunity to work on systems that directly impact user growth. I look forward to contributing to cross-team initiatives and mentoring engineers to raise the bar on system design.

Thank you for considering my application. I am eager to discuss how my skills and experience can help Pinterest achieve its growth goals.

Possible Interview Questions

Describe your experience with attribution models. How would you design a multi-touch attribution system for a performance marketing platform?

I have worked with last-click, multi-touch, and probabilistic attribution models. For a multi-touch system, I would design a pipeline that collects conversion events from various touchpoints, assigns weights based on rules (e.g., time decay, position-based), and stores attribution results in a data warehouse. The system should be flexible to support different models and handle privacy constraints like SKAN.

How would you handle bidding optimization at scale across multiple ad platforms?

I would build a centralized bidding service that ingests real-time signals (e.g., conversion rates, budget constraints) and uses optimization algorithms (e.g., PID controllers, reinforcement learning) to adjust bids. The system should integrate with each platform's API, handle latency requirements, and include fallback strategies for API failures.

Explain a time you led a cross-team technical initiative. How did you ensure alignment?

I led a project to migrate our event pipeline to a new streaming platform. I organized design reviews, created a shared document outlining goals and milestones, and held weekly syncs with stakeholders from data engineering, product, and marketing. By addressing concerns early and demonstrating incremental value, we gained buy-in and delivered on time.

How do you approach system reliability for spend-critical systems?

I implement robust monitoring, alerting, and automated rollbacks. For example, I set up dashboards tracking spend metrics and anomaly detection. I also design systems with graceful degradation, such as using cached bidding strategies if the primary service fails. Regular chaos engineering tests help identify weaknesses.

How do you stay updated on privacy changes affecting attribution?

I follow industry blogs, attend conferences, and participate in working groups. For instance, I studied Apple's SKAN framework and implemented privacy-preserving aggregation techniques. I also collaborate with legal and data science teams to adapt our measurement stack proactively.

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.

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.

Pinterest’s performance marketing engineering team owns the end-to-end systems that turn marketing dollars into measured user growth spanning attribution, bidding, budget optimization, and campaign management across major advertising platforms. This role is responsible for designing systems that scale across channels and adapt as privacy landscapes shift.

What you’ll do:

Lead the technical roadmap for the performance marketing platform, defining the highest-impact investments across attribution, bidding, budget optimization, and campaign management
Drive hands-on engineering across ad platform integrations, event pipelines, and production systems that deploy and measure marketing spend
Design and evolve the measurement stack — attribution models, conversion signal collection, incrementality methodology, and privacy-resilient approaches as platform signals degrade
Develop systems that automate and optimize bidding strategies and campaign experimentation at scale
Drive cross-team technical initiatives with ads platform, data warehouse, and mobile teams — authoring design documents and building alignment across engineering orgs
Own system reliability and operational health for spend-critical systems where downtime or bugs have direct financial impact
Collaborate with marketing, data science, and product partners to identify growth opportunities and turn them into engineered solutions
Mentor and develop engineers on the team, establishing technical best practices and raising the bar on system design
Use AI to accelerate your own work—across exploration, drafting, analysis, and synthesis—while maintaining strong judgment, rigorous validation, and accountability for outcomes

What we’re looking for:

7+ years of experience building and shipping backend systems, with hands-on experience supporting performance marketing
Strong understanding of paid media platforms — Google Ads, Meta, TikTok, Snap, or similar — and the operational realities of integrating with their APIs at scale
Deep understanding of attribution methodologies (last click, multi-touch, SKAN, probabilistic vs. deterministic), incrementality testing, and conversion optimization, with hands-on experience integrating mobile measurement partners (AppsFlyer, Adjust, Singular, or similar) across mobile clients and server-side APIs
Experience with near real-time systems for bidding, budget optimization, and conversion event delivery — you understand the mechanics well enough to evolve existing systems and propose improvements
Strong proficiency building and operating data pipelines and services using Python or Java/Scala, plus SQL; experience with modern big data ecosystems is a plus
Strong systems design skills across distributed systems, event-driven architectures, and service-oriented backends
Familiarity with ML infrastructure concepts and ability to build systems that support ML workloads
Demonstrated ability to use AI to accelerate your workflow while maintaining high standards for verification, data integrity, and ownership of final outputs
Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field such as Computer Science, 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.

#LI-REMOTE

#LI-AG8

At Pinterest we believe the workplace should be equitable, inclusive, and inspiring for every employee. In an effort to provide greater transparency, we are sharing the base salary range for this position. The position is also eligible for equity. Final salary is based on a number of factors including location, travel, relevant prior experience, or particular skills and expertise.

Information regarding the culture at Pinterest and benefits available for this position can be found here.

US based applicants only

$177,185—$364,795 USD

Our Commitment to Inclusion:

Pinterest is an equal opportunity employer and makes employment decisions on the basis of merit. We want to have the best qualified people in every job. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion or religious creed, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, status as a protected veteran, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information or characteristics (or those of a family member) or any other consideration made unlawful by applicable federal, state or local laws. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you require a medical or religious accommodation during the job application process, please complete this form for support.

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