Jobs / United States / Pinterest INC
Director, Machine Learning Engineering, Ads Quality
Pinterest INC · 🇺🇸 Palo Alto, CA, US; San Francisco, CA, US
Sponsorship verdict
Sponsorship possible
One solid signal, not two — worth applying, and worth asking about sponsorship early.
- Employer is on a government sponsor recordThe US Department of Labor certified 218 H-1B/E-3 labor condition applications for this employer between Oct 2025 and Jun 2026 (latest Jun 2026) — the step every H-1B hire needs first. USCIS also records 53 H-1B approvals in FY2023. Source: LCA disclosure data (US Department of Labor (OFLC)).
- The posting doesn’t mention sponsorshipSilence isn’t a refusal — ask the recruiter before investing much time.
- No salary bar for this routeH-1B has no fixed salary bar: the employer must pay at least the prevailing wage for the role and area. Cap-subject employers enter a lottery weighted by wage level. Source: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/12/29/2025-23853/weighted-selection-process-for-registrants-and-petitioners-seeking-to-file-cap-subject-h-1b, rules effective 2026-02-27.
- What Pinterest INC paid sponsored hires in similar roles28 certified filings for “Machine Learning Engineer II” (Data Scientists) in CA: $174k–$225k, median $174k. Most were filed at wage level II (54%) — 2 lottery entries, ≈31% projected selection odds for cap-subject employers. Source: US Department of Labor LCA disclosure data (Oct 2025 – Jun 2026).
- Confirmed live todayWhen a source last listed this job as open.
US H-1B: cap-subject employers enter a lottery weighted by wage level — Level I gets 1 entry, Level IV gets 4 (DHS projected selection odds ≈15% at Level I to ≈61% at Level IV). Universities and non-profit research employers are cap-exempt. The $100,000 fee for new petitions from abroad is currently blocked by a court order (appeal pending).
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Sponsor Radar — Pinterest INC
The US Department of Labor certified 218 H-1B/E-3 labor condition applications for this employer between Oct 2025 and Jun 2026 (latest Jun 2026) — the step every H-1B hire needs first. USCIS also records 53 H-1B approvals in FY2023. Source: LCA disclosure data (US Department of Labor (OFLC)).
Past sponsorship or register membership never guarantees sponsorship for this vacancy or for you. Full Sponsor Radar for Pinterest INC →
About the role
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 is a visual discovery platform where hundreds of millions of people come to find inspiration and decide what to try, buy, or do next. Our Ads Quality organization builds the machine-learning systems that make ads relevant and valuable to Pinners while delivering meaningful outcomes for advertisers. We are seeking a Director of Machine Learning Engineering to lead a broad portfolio of Ads Quality modeling teams focused on engagement, conversion, ROAS optimization, ranking, representation learning, and ML-powered experimentation. In this role, you will shape and drive a unified technical strategy across Ads Quality, leading teams responsible for engagement ranking, oCPM and conversion modeling, ROAS optimization, lightweight ranking and retrieval models, foundation model adoption, sequence and multimodal modeling, and the quality and efficiency of production machine learning systems. What you’ll do: • Set the technical vision and multi-year strategy for Ads Quality machine learning, connecting model innovation to Pinner value, advertiser performance, revenue, and marketplace health. • Lead and develop a group of engineering managers, senior technical leaders, and machine-learning engineers across multiple modeling domains. • Establish a coherent modeling roadmap across engagement, conversion, ROAS, relevance, ranking, and foundation-model initiatives. • Drive improvements in model quality, calibration, generalization, cold-start performance, attribution, and robustness across Pinterest surfaces. • Guide the evolution of Ads models toward larger, more generalizable architectures, including foundation models, distillation, long-context sequence modeling, multimodal representations, and cross-domain learning. • Ensure that modeling investments translate into reliable production outcomes through strong offline evaluation, online experimentation, launch discipline, and post-launch monitoring. • Partner closely with Ads Product, Ads Data Science, Ads Signals, Ads Retrieval, Ads Delivery, Measurement, Core, ATG, and ML Infrastructure. • Set expectations for training-serving parity, data quality, privacy, reliability, latency, capacity, and cost efficiency. • Improve engineering velocity through better experimentation workflows, reusable modeling infrastructure, automation, and agentic development tools. • Build a culture of technical excellence, candid collaboration, inclusion, ownership, and continuous learning. • Represent Ads Quality ML in senior leadership forums and communicate strategy, tradeoffs, risks, and results clearly to technical and non-technical audiences. What we’re looking for: