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Distinguished Engineer Jobs in Seattle, WA (NOW HIRING)

Pinterest

Distinguished Engineer

Seattle, WA · On-site +1

About the role: We're looking for a Distinguished Engineer to set the technical vision and lead foundational work across Homefeed, Search, and our emerging AI Assistant experiences at Pinterest. This ...

Walmart

Distinguished, Software Engineer

Bellevue, WA · On-site

$152K - $204K/yr

Distinguished Engineer - Marketplace, Category Strategic Initiatives (CSI) We are seeking a talented and passionate Distinguished Engineer to join our team. In this role, you will serve as a ...

Walmart

Distinguished, Software Engineer

Bellevue, WA · On-site

$156K - $312K/yr

Distinguished Engineer - Marketplace, Category Strategic Initiatives (CSI) We are seeking a talented and passionate Distinguished Engineer to join our team. In this role, you will serve as a ...

Nvidia

Distinguished Engineer - Dynamo

Seattle, WA

As a Distinguished Engineer, you will be a key technical leader, helping drive technology and product direction, provide deep technical expertise and guidance to the team and NVIDIA at large, and ...

NVIDIA

Distinguished Engineer - Dynamo

Seattle, WA · On-site

NVIDIA is a leading technology company focused on AI and deep learning, currently seeking a distinguished-level Engineer to join the Dynamo engineering team. In this role, you will provide technical ...

Elevance Health

Distinguished AI Engineer

Seattle, WA · On-site +1

Distinguished AI Engineer Distinguished AI Engineer Location: This role requires associates to be in-office 1 - 2 days per week, fostering collaboration and connectivity, while providing flexibility ...

Elevance Health

Distinguished AI Engineer

Seattle, WA · On-site +1

Distinguished AI Engineer Location: This role requires associates to be in-office 1 - 2 days per week, fostering collaboration and connectivity, while providing flexibility to support productivity ...

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Showing results 1-20

All JobsDistinguished Engineer JobsDistinguished Engineer Jobs in Seattle, WA

Distinguished Engineer information

See Seattle, WA salary details

$35.3K

$109.1K

$145.2K

How much do distinguished engineer jobs pay per year?

As of Jul 6, 2026, the average yearly pay for distinguished engineer in Seattle, WA is $109,080.00, according to ZipRecruiter salary data. Most workers in this role earn between $92,200.00 and $132,100.00 per year, depending on experience, location, and employer.

What engineers make 200,000 a year?

Senior and lead engineers, such as software engineers, systems engineers, and engineering managers, can earn $200,000 or more annually, especially with extensive experience, specialized skills, and working in high-demand industries like technology, aerospace, or finance. Achieving this salary often requires advanced certifications, expertise in key tools, and leadership responsibilities.

What are the key skills and qualifications needed to thrive in the Distinguished Engineer position, and why are they important?

To thrive as a Distinguished Engineer, you need extensive expertise in software architecture, system design, and deep technical problem-solving, often supported by an advanced degree and a robust track record in engineering leadership roles. Mastery of programming languages, architectural frameworks, cloud platforms, and experience with industry-standard tools such as CI/CD pipelines is typical, along with relevant certifications like AWS Certified Solutions Architect or Google Cloud Professional Engineer. Exceptional communication, mentorship, and strategic thinking skills set candidates apart by fostering innovation and guiding teams towards effective solutions. These skills and qualities are crucial for driving large-scale technical initiatives, shaping company-wide technology strategies, and mentoring engineering talent.

What is a Distinguished Engineer job?

A Distinguished Engineer is a senior-level technical expert recognized for their deep expertise, leadership, and impact on engineering and innovation. They drive complex technical strategies, mentor engineers, and influence the company's technology direction. Unlike managerial roles, they focus on solving high-impact technical challenges and setting industry standards.

What are typical career advancement opportunities for a Distinguished Engineer?

As a Distinguished Engineer, you have the opportunity to influence major technical decisions and take on leadership roles in shaping company technology strategy. While this position is already among the highest technical tracks, you may advance further to roles like Chief Architect or Principal Technical Fellow, or choose to expand your impact by moving into organizational leadership or executive positions. Distinguished Engineers often lead cross-functional initiatives, mentor other engineers, and represent the company in industry forums or technical communities. This role offers a blend of deep technical contribution and broad organizational influence, enabling career growth along both technical and leadership paths.

What does a Distinguished Engineer do?

A Distinguished Engineer is a senior technical role responsible for leading complex projects, setting technical strategy, and driving innovation within an organization. They often mentor other engineers, influence product development, and contribute to industry standards, requiring deep expertise and strong problem-solving skills.

What engineers make $300,000 a year?

Senior engineers in specialized fields such as software engineering, data engineering, and systems architecture can earn $300,000 or more annually, especially with extensive experience, advanced skills, and working in high-demand industries like technology or finance. Roles like Distinguished Engineer or Principal Engineer often reach or exceed this compensation level, particularly in large tech companies that offer stock options and bonuses.

What engineers make $500,000 a year?

Senior-level engineers such as Distinguished Engineers, Staff Engineers, or Principal Engineers in technology companies often earn $500,000 or more annually, especially with bonuses, stock options, and other compensation. These roles typically require extensive experience, advanced technical skills, and leadership responsibilities in fields like software development, cloud computing, or systems architecture.
What are popular job titles related to Distinguished Engineer jobs in Seattle, WA? For Distinguished Engineer jobs in Seattle, WA, the most frequently searched job titles are:
What job categories do people searching Distinguished Engineer jobs in Seattle, WA look for? The top searched job categories for Distinguished Engineer jobs in Seattle, WA are:
Distinguished Engineer jobs near you
Infographic showing various Distinguished Engineer job openings in Seattle, WA as of June 2026, with employment types broken down into 99% Full Time, and 1% Part Time. Highlights an 88% Physical, 4% Hybrid, and 8% Remote job distribution, with an average salary of $109,080 per year, or $52.4 per hour.
Distinguished Engineer

Distinguished Engineer

Pinterest

Seattle, WA • On-site, Remote

Full-time

Posted 13 days ago

Job description

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.
About the role:
We're looking for a Distinguished Engineer to set the technical vision and lead foundational work across Homefeed, Search, and our emerging AI Assistant experiences at Pinterest. This role sits at the intersection of relevance, ranking, retrieval, and generative AI, and will shape how hundreds of millions of Pinners discover and act on inspiration every day.
You will operate as a cross-cutting technical leader: defining long-term architecture, raising the bar on ML and systems excellence, and partnering closely with product and executive leadership to drive step-function improvements in engagement, quality, and creator value.
What you'll do:
  • Define the long-term technical strategy and architecture for Homefeed, Search, and AI Assistant, including retrieval, ranking, personalization, and generative experiences.
  • Drive a multi-year roadmap for unifying signals, features, and models across surfaces to deliver a coherent, high-quality discovery experience.
  • Lead the design and adoption of large-scale retrieval and ranking systems (e.g., multi-stage retrieval, representation learning, multi-objective optimization) that materially improve relevance and monetization.
  • Architect how LLMs and foundation models integrate with our core discovery stack (e.g., query understanding, intent modeling, content understanding, conversation orchestration, safety/guardrails).
  • Set technical direction for experimentation, measurement, and evaluation frameworks, including offline metrics, online experimentation, and causal inference for discovery and generative use cases.
  • Provide hands-on technical leadership on a small number of high-leverage projects: design critical components, review designs/PRs, de-risk complex launches, and mentor senior engineers and staff+ TLs.
  • Partner deeply with Product, Data Science, Research, and Design to frame the right problems, translate product bets into robust technical plans, and ensure we are solving for long-term platform health, not just short-term metrics.
  • Raise the bar for engineering excellence: reliability, performance, security/privacy, cost efficiency, and operational health of large-scale ML systems.
  • Represent Pinterest externally for these domains (e.g., talks, publications, partnerships) and help attract and grow top talent.
  • You will report into Pinterest's Core Engineering leadership and work horizontally across multiple product and platform teams responsible for Homefeed, Search, and AI Assistant.
  • You will spend a meaningful portion of your time on hands-on technical work (design, reviews, prototyping) while also driving long-term strategy, standards, and alignment across organizations.
  • You will be measured on durable technical impact: system-level improvements, model and product outcomes, reduction in complexity and operational risk, and the growth of leaders and capabilities around you.

What we're looking for:
  • 15+ years of industry experience in large-scale systems and/or machine learning, with a track record of impact in search, recommendations, feeds, or conversational AI.
  • Proven experience as a Distinguished Engineer, Architect, or equivalent senior technical leader driving cross-org technical strategy and execution.
  • Deep expertise in at least two of the following, and strong familiarity with the others:
    • Large-scale retrieval and ranking (e.g., learning-to-rank, multi-task and multi-objective optimization, bandits, RL for recommendations).
    • Representation learning (e.g., embeddings, multi-modal models, dense and sparse retrieval).
    • Search systems (indexing, query understanding, relevance tuning, latency/throughput optimization).
    • Large language models and generative AI (prompting, fine-tuning, RAG, agents, safety/guardrails, evaluation).
  • Demonstrated ability to define and drive multi-year architectural transformations at scale (e.g., re-architecting a core ranking stack, unifying feature platforms, evolving legacy systems to modern ML platforms).
  • Strong product intuition and experience partnering with PM/Design/Data Science on ambiguous, 0→1 and 1→N product bets.
  • Exceptional communication skills: able to crisply articulate strategy, tradeoffs, and technical direction to executives, peers, and broad engineering audiences.
  • Passion for mentoring and growing senior/staff engineers; history of building strong engineering cultures and communities of practice.
  • Bachelor's degree in computer science, a related field or equivalent experience.

Nice to have:
    • Prior experience in consumer discovery products at global scale (e.g., feeds, search, recommendations, marketplaces, or assistants).
    • Experience building or integrating AI assistants or agentic workflows into consumer experiences.

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.
  • Some teams will need you to be in the office for in-person collaboration 1-2 times/quarter and therefore can be situated anywhere in the country. While other teams will need you to be in the office for in-person collaboration 1 times per week and therefore needs to be in a commutable distance from one of the following offices, [SF, Palo Alto, Seattle].

#LI-REMOTE
#LI-AG8
At Pinterest we believe the workplace should be equitable, inclusive, and inspiring for every employee. In an effort to provide greater transparency, we are sharing the base salary range for this position. The position is also eligible for equity. Final salary is based on a number of factors including location, travel, relevant prior experience, or particular skills and expertise.
Information regarding the culture at Pinterest and benefits available for this position can be found here.
US based applicants only
$280,148-$576,774 USD
Our Commitment to Inclusion:
Pinterest is an equal opportunity employer and makes employment decisions on the basis of merit. We want to have the best qualified people in every job. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion or religious creed, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, status as a protected veteran, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information or characteristics (or those of a family member) or any other consideration made unlawful by applicable federal, state or local laws. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you require a medical or religious accommodation during the job application process, please complete this form for support.
By submitting this application, I certify that all information submitted in my application and throughout the hiring process is true, accurate, and complete to the best of my knowledge. I understand that any false statement, omission, or misrepresentation may disqualify me from employment consideration or result in termination if discovered after hire.

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