VP, Engineering for Monetization - Machine Learning and Data Science

At Pinterest, we're on a mission to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love. For our employees, this extends further to creating the life and career they love. The Pinterest Engineering Blog team sat down with Behnam Rezaei to get an inside scoop into the Monetization Engineering team, what makes Pinterest different and why now is a great time to join our team. Joining Pinterest in March 2023, Behnam Rezaei is Pinterest's VP for Monetization — Machine Learning Engineering and Data Science based in San Francisco. Can you share more about your team at Pinterest? What's the goal of the team? What are the biggest opportunities you see? What are you most looking forward to? Pinterest has three main engineering organizations: infrastructure which is an enabler for various teams, core engineering is focused on building the core consumer experience and the last one is related to all things monetization. Monetization is the revenue-generating org for Pinterest. I lead the Machine Learning (ML) and Data Science teams within the Monetization org. Our customers are both Pinterest users and our advertising partners. In this day and age, a lot of the information matching is done using machine learning, and our job is to understand what users and advertisers are looking for and do the matching. We do our job well when we match the best ads to the interests and intent of our users. Our work in Monetization ML is critical to supporting our users, advertisers, and our business. Relevant ads means a better experience for our users, higher ROI for advertisers and more money we can invest into the business to continue this flywheel. I'm really excited about the advancements in the machine learning world and how they can be applied to our work at Pinterest. With large models predicting outcomes much better, we see a lot of opportunity in supporting users' control over what they see, respecting users' privacy choices and helping them through the journey from inspiration to realization (like connecting them with the most relevant ads). In this evolving, privacy-centric world where we need to thread together personalization in advertising and respect of user choices, this area of developing and applying machine learning models for advertising is really challenging (and fulfilling).

At Pinterest, we're on a mission to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love. For our employees, this extends further to creating the life and career they love.