Staff Software Engineer, Service Communications

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 . Intro : The Service Communications team manages the foundational high-layer networking systems ensuring reliable, secure, and performant service-to-service interactions at Pinterest. Our Envoy-based mesh and multi-language frameworks provide critical primitives for hundreds of internal services, and we are looking for a Staff Engineer to lead technical strategy across identity, traffic optimization, and platform scaling. What you’ll do: Architect and deploy advanced service mesh features, focusing on service discovery, traffic shaping, and deep observability using Envoy proxy. Lead the organization-wide adoption of service identity and mTLS to satisfy critical AAA security requirements for service-to-service paths. Design traffic optimization primitives like locality-aware routing to materially reduce data transfer costs for high-volume service traffic. Maintain and modernize service framework libraries in Java, Python, and C++, enhancing the developer experience and operational reliability. Collaborate with service owners across the company to drive adoption and refine infrastructure requirements for emerging feature needs. Partner with infrastructure peers on multi-region and multi-cloud strategies that rely on robust service communication primitives. Use AI to accelerate analysis and iteration, while applying judgment and verification to ensure correctness and quality. Join the team oncall rotation to manage incident response, perform post-mortems, and drive long-term reliability improvements. What we’re looking for: 6+ years of infrastructure or platform engineering experience, specifically within distributed systems or RPC framework development. Deep technical expertise in service mesh technologies such as Envoy or Istio, including hands-on experience with L7 proxying. Proficiency across multiple languages (Java, Python, C++) and a track record of building internal libraries or developer tools. Strong understanding of service security, including mTLS adoption and identity management via SPIFFE/SPIRE. Proven ability to design highly available and efficient distributed systems at massive scale. Demonstrated experience driving the adoption of complex platform capabilities across diverse cross-functional engineering teams. Demonstrated experience using AI to accelerate engineering workflows, with a clear approach to validating accuracy and quality. Bachelor’s/Master’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, 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…