Staff Software Engineer, Service Communications

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 need to be in the office for in-person collaboration 1-2 times every 6-months and therefore can be situated anywhere in the country. 

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