Staff Technical Program Manager - Wichita, Kansas, US

Overview

While professional experience and qualifications are key for this role, make sure to check you have the preferable soft skills before applying if required.

In this role you drive high-impact ML/AI initiatives by leading multi-workstream programs across research, platform, safety, and product. You partner with senior leaders to translate strategy into executable roadmaps and deliver production-ready capabilities. You’ll shape governance, measure success, and scale operating mechanisms across teams. Your work accelerates AI-driven innovation that touches product and user experiences. This is a mission-driven opportunity to influence Pinterest’s AI capabilities at scale.

Compensation / Benefits

• equity offered
• base salary disclosed
• remote-friendly (LI-REMOTE)
• in-office 1–2 times per quarter
• PinFlex working model
• not eligible for relocation

Responsibilities

• Lead multi-workstream programs across ML research, platform engineering, infrastructure, safety/compliance, and product with a single roadmap and governance.
• Partner with VP/Director-level leaders to translate strategy into workstreams, staffing, milestones, and decisions.
• Drive the path from research to production: model development, evaluation, release management, serving capacity, and adoption by product teams.
• Define and track metrics and guardrails (quality, cost, reliability, adoption, cycle time) to guide decisions.
• Run technical design and decision forums; identify risks and tradeoffs early and align leadership on a path forward.
• Build scalable operating mechanisms (planning, reviews, intake, launch readiness, post-mortems) across teams.
• Use AI tooling to automate tracking, reporting, and program insights.
• Communicate status, risks, and decisions to executives and cross-functional partners, tailoring depth to the audience.

Key requirements

• Minimum 8 years in technical program management, engineering, or related roles with lead experience in ML/AI or platform programs.
• Bachelor's degree in a technical field or equivalent practical experience.
• Deep technical understanding of ML/AI systems (training and post-training, evaluation, model serving, GPU capacity, release management) and platform engineering.
• Experience with LLM/multimodal model adoption, such as adapting open-source models and evaluating frameworks; migrating workloads between providers (strong plus).
• Ability to partner with VP/Director-level leaders and influence strategy and prioritization.
• Experience designing planning processes and governance across multiple organizations.
• Strong analytical skills: SQL, dashboards, and data-driven decision-making from experiments and evaluations.
• Comfort with high ambiguity, rapid tech changes, and cross-functional work with Legal, Privacy, and Safety.
• Excellent written and verbal communication for executive audiences. xklufbp
• Proven ability to build and scale processes and automate program management with AI tools.
• Strong communication
• Cross-functional collaboration
• Strategic thinking
• ML/AI systems knowledge (training, evaluation, serving)
• Platform engineering
• GPUs and deployment