People Behind the Product: Meet Rahim Daya, Head of International Product & Toronto Lead

Rahim Daya, Toronto-native and Pinployee of nearly 4 years, leads Pinterest’s International Product as well as the Tech team in Toronto. Ahead of our virtual Pinterest Engineering: Meet the Toronto Team event, get to know Rahim and learn more about…

Fighting spam with Guardian, a real-time analytics and rules engine

As the Trust & Safety team, one of our major responsibilities is protecting Pinners from spam. Without protections, spam could potentially be all over Pinterest since spammers can script and generate activity at a rate much higher than actual users. One of…

How we designed our Continuous Integration System to be more than 50% Faster

Earlier this year, the Engineering Productivity team at Pinterest published a blog called How a one line change decreased our clone times by 99%. In that post, we described how a simple Git configuration sped up clone times in one of our…

How Pinterest runs Traffic-based Interlinking experiments for SEO

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is an important channel for people to find ideas and inspiration on Pinterest, and can also help expose new users to first use cases, such as hairstyle tutorials or a home office setup. …

Understanding the product cycle of discovery to purchase on Pinterest

Pinners have always used Pinterest for shopping, as they often come in a planning mindset and are exploring products and…

Virtual onboarding in the time of COVID-19: The new hire’s new normal

Cindy Xinyi Zhang | Data Scientist, Experimentation and Metrics Science On March 2nd, exactly one week before my full-time position at Pinterest started…

Pre-Submit Integration Tests For Ads-Serving

Introduction & Background The ads-serving platform is the highest-scale, highest-complexity, and highest-velocity recommendation service at Pinterest. Our ads business is growing and expanding, and the ads engineering team is iterating quickly to continue to improve the system. Therefore, it is vital to keep the system healthy, in order…

Improving the Quality of Recommended Pins with Lightweight Ranking

The Pinterest corpus is composed of billions of Pins, however, each Pinner only sees a small subset based on their interests when…

Multi-task Learning and Calibration for Utility-based Home Feed Ranking

Home feed is one of the most important surfaces at Pinterest that drives a significant portion of engagement from the more than 400+ million people who visit each month. From a…

Partitioning Pinlater for Fun(?) and Profit(!)

Contained within the November 2015 announcement of the open-sourcing of Pinlater, our asynchronous job execution system, was a description of some of the improvements that had been made to the system since the original 2014 blog post describing its creation. Notable among…

Powering inclusive search & recommendations with our new visual skin tone model

To truly bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love, Pinterest is committed to content diversity and to developing inclusive search and recommendation engines…

How we use AutoML, Multi-task learning and Multi-tower models for Pinterest Ads

People come to Pinterest in an exploration mindset, often engaging with ads the same way they do with organic Pins. Within ads our mission is to help Pinners go from inspiration to action by introducing them to the compelling products and services that…

PinnerSage: Multi-Modal User Embedding Framework for Recommendations at Pinterest

As we build a visual discovery engine that powers 2B+ Pins, it’s crucial to understand user interests and preferences in…

Pin it to Win it: Our First Virtual Pinternship

When our University Recruitment team started planning for the 2020 Pinterns to arrive, our goal was to welcome them to Pinterest and provide them with a memorable experience. As the pandemic quickly changed everyone’s plans, this core goal remained the same and we adapted our strategy to accommodate the…

Driving Shopping Upsells from Pinterest Search

Pinterest’s mission is to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love. Shopping is at the core of Pinterest’s mission by helping Pinners find and purchase the products they like. Oftentimes when Pinners want to buy…

Using PID controllers to diversify content types on home feed

Every day millions of Pinners visit the home feed to find inspiration on Pinterest. As a member of the home feed ranking team, it’s my job to not only figure out what relevant pins to show Pinners but also to make sure that…

Empowering Pinterest data scientists and machine learning engineers with PySpark

Data scientists and machine learning engineers at Pinterest found themselves hitting major challenges with existing tools. Hive and Presto were readily accessible tools for large scale data transformations, but complex logic…

One year in at Pinterest and looking ahead as we grow

A little over a year ago, I joined Pinterest as the SVP of Technology. The world looks different than I thought it would around my first “Pinniversary”, but the opportunities before us are more apparent and abundant than ever before. For me personally, I’m…

Using machine learning to auto-organize boards

While planning one’s life might look different these days, our insights tell us people are saving ideas for the future more than ever. Last month, for instance, Pinterest had a 60% increase in the number…

User state-based notification volume optimization

Notifications play an important role in helping Pinterest’s 335M+ monthly active users discover and engage with inspiring content. It’s crucial to send the right number of notifications with high quality content. If we send too few notifications, Pinners might miss out on great opportunities…

Contextual relevance in ads ranking

Pinterest runs an ads marketplace that balances value for Pinners, partners, and the business. We initially used engagement prediction as our main method to balance the marketplace before eventually adding contextual relevance to increase Pinner value. We have three main surfaces for determining…

Launching your career as an apprentice engineer at Pinterest

In 2018, after more than a decade focused on environmental sustainability, I decided to start a new career as a software engineer. I enrolled in an immersive software development course in NYC, and a year later I was headed to a software engineering apprenticeship…

How Pinterest Supercharged its Growth Team With Experiment Idea Review

Growth teams need to be organized bottom-up to scale well The Pinterest Growth team has over 100 members, and we’ve run thousands of experiments over the years. It’s difficult to run that many experiments and still maintain a high success rate over time. We’ve found the traditional growth team model of team leads…

The Fantastic Fixathon

Engineers at Pinterest are always focused on doing what’s best for the product, but working in a codebase that’s clean, well-maintained, and relatively bug-free transforms engineering tasks from being “just work” to enjoyable opportunities to flex our skills. We’re also enriched as engineers, both technically and otherwise, when we take…

Using graph algorithms to optimize Kafka operations, Part 1

Pinterest uses Kafka across the board for data movement. The Logging Platform team alone manages over 3,000 Kafka brokers transporting trillions of messages per day to help bring more than 320 million monthly active Pinners the inspiration to create a life they love. …