Sr. Director, Security Engineering

About this role

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 .

Role Summary Pinterest is looking for a Senior Director of Security Engineering to serve as the CISO's operating partner and lead the engineering execution for the entire Product and Cloud Security areas of our information security program. This is not a conventional security-leadership hire — it is a mandate to run a significant, multi-domain engineering organization at the intersection of product security, cloud and infrastructure security, and privacy engineering.

Reporting directly to the CISO, you will own approximately two-thirds of Pinterest's entire information security program: a team of 40+ engineers organized across five direct reports, and a scope that spans from secure product development and platform controls to privacy-by-design architecture and AI security. You will translate Pinterest's security and privacy strategy into measurable, durable engineering outcomes — and serve as a trusted partner to Engineering, Product, Legal, Privacy, and Trust & Safety leadership.

What You'll Do:

• Own the end-to-end security engineering organization spanning product security, application security, identity and access management, vulnerability management, security architecture, supply chain and AI/product-risk controls, and cloud infrastructure security.

• Define and drive Pinterest's multi-year security engineering roadmap; translate risk appetite and policy into executable, measurable engineering programs across product and infrastructure lifecycles

• Serve as the executive owner of threat modeling, secure design review, and developer security enablement — embedding security as a first-class capability within Pinterest's engineering culture

• Partner closely with VP-level engineering, product, and infrastructure leaders and teams to seamlessly integrate security into the software development lifecycle. Leverage relationships with strategic partners such as AWS to operate at the leading edge of cloud security best practices

• Lead Pinterest's security privacy engineering function as a product-grade capability: privacy-by-design systems, data inventory and classification, consent and preference controls, data lifecycle and deletion.

• Drive the maturation of privacy engineering beyond compliance response — building reusable, scalable engineering primitives that make privacy-preserving development faster and safer across Pinterest's product surface area

• Champion and evangelize foundational security platforms and libraries to ensure a secure production and data infrastructure. This includes adoption of enterprise grade IAM (e.g. machines, workloads, agents, users) systems, secrets management, network security and container security.

• Own Cloud Governance: Leads cloud security posture and governance. Define and enforce standards for IaC security, AWS resource provisioning, CI/CD pipeline security, and overall security policies.

• Direct the maturation of the Security Compliance & Accountability platform. Establish and enforce rigorous metrics across multiple focus areas, including AAA (Authentication, Authorization, Accounting) standards and automated vulnerability management.

• Serve as the CISO's primary operating partner: synthesizing complex security and risk narratives into concise executive communications, investment cases, and evidence of risk reduction for senior leadership and the board

• Build deep, trusted partnerships with Engineering, Product, Legal/Privacy, Trust & Safety, IT, Internal Audit, and Data leadership — spending approximately 50% of your time driving cross-functional alignment and execution

• Establish a unified operating system for security and privacy engineering — aligning roadmaps, service levels, prioritization, and success metrics across all domains under your ownership

• Build and strengthen a high-performing global leadership bench: mentor and lead a high-performing team of senior staff security engineers and managers.Clarify organizational structures and accountabilities, and establish a scalable talent model across a geographically distributed team.

• Shape Pinterest's approach to AI security — spanning both the security of AI-powered product surfaces and the application of AI/ML to improve operational efficiency, and threat response.

What We're Looking For:

• 15+ years of progressive experience in security engineering, with a career foundation in software engineering or security software engineering — you started writing code and have built your career from that craft

• Demonstrated experience leading a large, multi-domain security engineering organization (30+ engineers) at a B2C consumer internet platform of comparable scale — experience at companies with elevated consumer threat models (e.g., social platforms, marketplaces, consumer fintech adjacent) is strongly preferred

• Deep, hands-on expertise in product

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