Staff Technical Program Manager, Search Relevance

Zigsaw

Technical Program Manager driving Search and Merchant ML/AI programs at Pinterest. Establishing relationships with Search teams and leading high-impact strategic initiatives.

Posted 5/27/2026full-timeSan Francisco • California • 🇺🇸 United StatesLead💰 $145,747 - $300,067 per yearWebsite

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Establish and own relationships with key partners across Search teams as their strategic and execution partner for delivering high impact programs.
Define and drive Search, Relevance, and Merchant ML/AI programs based on current and emerging needs, ensuring scope, responsibilities, and ownership are well-established, risks are proactively identified and mitigated and that programs are executed and landed successfully.
Lead the day-to-day program management of multiple work streams across the product process, including product strategy, technical design, and experimentation.
Analyze merchant distribution and shopping experiences in partnership with Data Science; leverage these insights to lead strategy steering committees with cross-functional VPs.
Build a subject-matter-expertise on query understanding and search engines.
Drive product, business, and OKR requirements while also streamlining engineering efforts and cost.
Identify gaps in shopping and search distribution strategy (i.e. signals, content, etc.) and operationalize processes to close those gaps.
Own and scale the headcount and roadmap planning process for a large engineering org.
Drive High-Ambiguity strategic bets: Act as the core delivery powerhouse for high-impact, fast-moving experiments. Translate ambitious executive visions into highly executable, phased project plans.
Manage the overarching portfolio of programs within the org and mentor junior TPMs to optimize resource allocation and uplevel team performance.
Use GenAI as the default operating model for EP PgM execution—producing AI-assisted first drafts of core program artifacts, modernizing high-toil workflows into AI-first mechanisms (e.g., intake triage, status synthesis, action/decision extraction, risk & dependency tracking), and synthesizing signals to proactively surface risks, decision/trade-offs, and escalation paths.
Prototype solutions to augment decisions through data (e.g. dashboards, data analysis) or simplify processes (e.g. process and workflow helpers, or internal tools) using AI coding assistants (“vibe coding”).
Follow Pinterest AI guidance for risk, governance, and safety-by-design: appropriately handle sensitive data, validate AI-generated outputs, document assumptions/limits, and ensure AI-assisted workflows meet applicable policy/compliance expectations before broad adoption.

Requirements

What you’ll need

BS in a technical discipline or equivalent experience (7+ years in a technical or analytical role).
Strong technical breadth and judgment - ability to quickly ramp up and go deep on a range of technologies, ability to identify technical risks and tradeoffs.
Comfort with a fast-changing environment and ability to manage ambiguity.
Focus on execution and delivery in a data-informed environment.
Excellent communication skills and ability to work cross-functionally to identify opportunities and deliver solutions.
Exceptional relationship-building skills, organizational awareness, and ability to persuade others to accomplish program objectives while holding yourself and your team to a high standard of accountability.
Experience working with Search products at a low level of detail highly desirable.
AI-first execution mindset: demonstrated ability to use GenAI to accelerate planning, program operations, and stakeholder communications—starting with AI drafts and applying strong judgment to validate, refine, and drive decisions.
Workflow design, AI fluency, data & insights orientation: experience turning repeatable program work into durable, low-toil mechanisms and improving decision-making by using GenAI (e.g., strong prompting, vibe coding lightweight scripts/tools, dashboards, data analysis and leveraging agents where appropriate).
Safety-by-design AI fluency: experience operating within AI governance expectations (risk assessment, data handling, model/output validation, auditability/traceability) and proactively identifying where AI use is not appropriate or requires additional controls.

Benefits

Comp & perks

Equity eligible
Workplace should be equitable, inclusive, and inspiring

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

program managementdata analysisAI fluencyworkflow designtechnical designrisk assessmentquery understandingsearch enginesGenAIOKR requirements

Soft Skills

communication skillsrelationship-buildingorganizational awarenesspersuasionexecution focusambiguity managementaccountabilitycross-functional collaborationstrategic thinkingmentoring

Certifications

BS in a technical discipline