Sr Manager, Data Science - GenAI & Labeling Platforms

About Pinterest:  

Millions of people across the world come to Pinterest to find new ideas every day. It’s where they get inspiration, dream about new possibilities and plan for what matters most. Our mission is to help those people find their inspiration and create a life they love. In your role, you’ll be challenged to take on work that upholds this mission and pushes Pinterest forward. You’ll grow as a person and leader in your field, all the while helping Pinners make their lives better in the positive corner of the internet.

Creating a life you love also means finding a career that celebrates the unique perspectives and experiences that you bring. As you read through the expectations of the position, consider how your skills and experiences may complement the responsibilities of the role. We encourage you to think through your relevant and transferable skills from prior experiences.

Our new progressive work model is called PinFlex, a term that’s uniquely Pinterest to describe our flexible approach to living and working. Visit our PinFlex landing page to learn more. 

Pinterest brings millions of people the inspiration to create a life they love. To evolve this mission our product and engineering teams need to innovate - much of this innovation is driven through machine learning, and critical to understanding how innovation on the product will change our business is through measurement. Data labels play a key role in unlocking both of these, and the rate and scale at which we can obtain reliable labels limits our speed of innovation.

This role brings together 3 critical science efforts:

• The notion of asking qualified raters to answer questions about content, whether it’s scoring its relevance to a particular context, review captions for pins, or determining whether or where certain attributes are present in an image, has played a critical role in our evaluation and machine learning efforts across Pinterest. However, utilizing human evaluators to complete these tasks at scale have limitations - it can be time-intensive to accurately define the tasks, costly to get large volumes of labels, and slow to collect the data. 
• Surveys of our Pinners offer a unique mechanism to gather the perspective of our Pinners on questions we have about the platform and content; a Pinner’s perspective can be different to that of a human rater observing the same content because of the unique context they possess.
• Advancements in Generative AI have opened up a wealth of opportunities for improvements in productivity, and we’ve only scratched the surface of its capabilities in the labeling space. Early results show strong promise for the role it can play in these tasks, reducing the time and cost of our labeling efforts, focusing our surveys and human rater efforts on higher value problems, and improving the accuracy of our learnings.

We’re looking for an accomplished Data Science leader to lead a small, high-performing team, to unlock a new level of capabilities in our efforts across labeling, surveys, and iterative GenAI tasks. From statistical approaches that can better inform the labels we collect to prototypes to automatically craft prompts for LLMs to address the needed tasks, this team will lead a key strategic component of the data science organization innovating on data platforms across the company.

What you’ll do:

We are looking for an experienced and highly capable Data Scientist to help us drive step function improvements in our data labeling capabilities at Pinterest. In this role, you will:

• Create and realize a strategic vision for the science investments across the labeling, survey and GenAI tooling space, emphasizing rigor alongside value-creation, and partner with product and engineering leaders to build a unified vision for these platforms.
• Build, inspire and grow a small high performing team of data scientists who are passionate about this space that will shape and execute on the strategic vision.
• Apply deep scientific knowledge and domain expertise to understand opportunities and prototype solutions that demonstrate substantial improvements in velocity, accuracy and cost-efficiency, measure and mitigate biases, and amplify the impact employees can have when utilizing survey results, data labels, or GenAI prompts in their investments.
• Translate ambiguous business challenges into actionable plans and ensure that your team is consistently producing trustworthy and high-quality technical output that influence the business.
• Communicate complex analytical findings and insights to both technical and non-t