Director of Data Science, Trust & Safety, Signals and Content Understanding

This is a pivotal Director-level leadership role with the opportunity to strengthen the foundations of trust on Pinterest while advancing how we understand Pinners and content at scale. You will lead a high-impact data science organization and partner deeply with Product, Engineering, and Policy to build and operate the next generation of integrity, user understanding, and content understanding systems that power enforcement and distribution decisions across the platform.The core mandate is to evolve the organization from reactive moderation and lagging harm reporting into a proactive, metrics-driven operating system—where we manage leading indicators that predict risk, improve understanding quality, and keep Pinterest safe, inspiring, and useful.

What you’ll do:

• Set Strategy & Roadmap: Define the multi-year vision and priorities across Trust & Safety, User Understanding, and Content Understanding—establishing north-star outcomes (e.g., prevalence & reach reduction, user trust, ecosystem health, content quality, user and content understanding) and the leading indicators that drive them.


• Operationalize Leading Indicators: Identify, instrument, and build operating cadences around key input metrics that influence integrity and understanding—such as policy risk signals, spam/abuse rates, account authenticity, coverage and latency, precision/recall of enforcement, appeal overturn rates, content quality signals, and user feedback/friction signals.


• Lead a Talented Organization: Hire, develop, and inspire a world-class team of data science managers and senior ICs spanning product analytics, ML evaluation, experimentation, causal inference, and integrity measurement.


• Partner to Ship Impact: Work hand-in-hand with Product, Engineering and Policy teams to deliver end-to-end improvements across detection, enforcement precision, and distribution systems—translating ambiguous trust and understanding questions into shipped product/ML capabilities with measurable impact.


• Elevate Measurement & Decision Quality: Own measurement strategy for safety, integrity, and understanding quality, employing causal inference, experimentation, offline evaluation, and long-term value measurement to quantify trade-offs and reduce unintended consequences.


• Communicate and Align Across Stakeholders: Present complex analyses and recommendations to executives and cross-functional partners, driving alignment on difficult trade-offs between safety, expression, growth, and product usability.


• Advance AI-Driven Content & User Understanding: Partner with Engineering and Product teams to evaluate, measure, and improve AI/ML models (including generative AI and embedding-based approaches) that power content quality signals, user understanding, and distribution decisions—establishing rigorous measurement frameworks to ensure these models are accurate, fair, and aligned with Pinterest's values.

What we’re looking for:

• MS or PhD in a quantitative field or equivalent experience.


• 10+ years in Data Science, Algorithmic Engineering, or ML, with significant impact in digital advertising or large-scale marketplaces.


• 5+ years of managing data science organizations, including managing managers.


• Experience leveraging and Harnessing AI & Agentic Approaches as a Force Multiplier for Data Science, championing the adoption of AI-powered tools and agentic workflows—such as LLM-assisted analysis, automated insight generation, and AI-driven anomaly detection—to dramatically accelerate the team's ability to surface insights, iterate on measurement frameworks, and scale analytical coverage enabling teams to operate with outsized impact


• Deep experience with:




• Statistical analysis, causal inference, and experiment design for complex marketplaces.


• Production analytics and large-scale data tooling (Python/R, SQL, Spark/Hive).


• Applied ML or relevance/ranking systems; familiarity with auction dynamics, pacing, and quality modeling.




• Proven ability to operate through input metrics tied to business outcomes.


• Excellent communication and influencing skills.

In-Office Requirement Statement:

• We let the type of work you do guide the collaboration style. That means we're not always working in an office, but we continue to gather for key moments of collaboration and connection.


• This role will need to be in the office for in-person collaboration 1-2 times/quarter and therefore can be situated anywhere in the country.

Relocation Statement:

• This position is not eligible for relocation assistance. Visit our PinFlex page to learn more about our working model.