Staff Software Engineer, Cache Infra

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The Cache Infra team manages one of Pinterest's most vital backend systems, offering huge scope and impact by serving hundreds of business-critical use cases across the entire company. Pinterest’s cache infra operates at a massive scale, managing 100+ production clusters with 450M total QPS. This role provides a unique opportunity to gain hands-on experience in building and operating large-scale distributed systems. The team works on challenging, exciting, and impactful projects, including next-generation cache infrastructure, compute modernization initiatives, and innovations related to AI.

What You’ll Do: 

1. Provide technical guidance and direction to a high-performing team to build reliable, performant and efficient caching systems that operate at a huge scale and empower numerous business critical applications across the entire company.
2. Contribute to a cross-functional strategic initiative to modernize the cache infra tech stack by adopting cutting-edge technologies.
3. Maintain a high engineering standard for cache infrastructure, focusing on continuous improvement in reliability, scalability, performance, cost efficiency, and developer velocity.
4. Serve as a member of the Cache Infra on-call team, providing timely support for all pages and critical issues, including monitoring, prompt response to alerts, issue diagnosis/resolution, and communicating status to stakeholders.
5. Use AI to accelerate team execution, system design, and decision-making, applying sound judgment to validate outputs and ensure correctness and quality.
6. Establish and maintain a high standard for technical excellence and production quality.
7. Mentor senior engineers on the team, developing the next generation of caching infrastructure team leaders.

What We’re Looking For: 

1. Bachelor’s degree in computer science, a related field or equivalent experience.
2. 8+ years of hands-on backend software engineering experience in large-scale distributed caching systems.
3. Experience building/managing caching systems such as memcached or Redis at scale.
4. Hands on experience building and operating highly available, reliable, production grade systems at scale.
5. Demonstrated technical leadership in setting roadmap and driving execution — including defining technical direction, leading engineering alignment, and partnering across teams to deliver complex platform investments.
6. Strong problem-solving skills and analytical mindset, with the ability to use data to guide decisions
7. Experience coding in one of the following languages: Java, Python and/or C/C++.
8. Demonstrated experience leveraging AI to accelerate development, enhance operations, and improve customer support.