Keeping Related Pins fresh

If you’ve ever heard someone mention “the Pinterest Rabbit Hole,” they’re likely referring to Related Pins, the ideas you see below a Pin you’ve tapped. Related Pins is a feed of content relevant to the closeup Pin and accounts for 40 percent of engagement…

How we increased engagement using automatic personalized copy testing

Think about the last time you visited a website. Was there a word that helped draw you in? Now think about how that might be different if you spoke a different language, were a different age or grew up in a different part of…

PinText: A Multitask Text Embedding System in Pinterest

Word embeddings have been actively studied and developed by researchers and practitioners in the machine learning community since the neural network language model was proposed. Researchers not only proposed principled algorithms and open-source code, but they also released pre-trained embedding models with public…

El fantástico Fixathon

Los ingenieros de Pinterest siempre están enfocados en hacer lo mejor para el producto, pero trabajar en una base de código limpia, con buen mantenimiento y relativamente libre de errores transforma las tareas de ingeniería de ser “solo trabajo” a oportunidades agradables para…

User retention at Pinterest: tackling an ambiguous problem

User retention is an important but nebulous idea. It’s hard to acquire users and even harder to help them feel at home through an engaging and relevant experience. So when some of those users start to leave the platform, your first thought is…

A one year PWA retrospective

The idea of building a “Progressive Web App” (PWA) is not new, but its definition has changed with the emergence of key technologies like service workers. Now it’s finally possible to build great experiences in a mobile browser. Being an early adopter can…

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…

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…

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…

How switching our domain structure unlocked international growth

More than half of the 200 million monthly active users on Pinterest use our app outside the U.S. As we continue to make Pinterest even better for our global users, we moved our traffic to country code top-level domains (ccTLDs). An example of this…

The top Pinterest Engineering blog posts of 2018

The most-read posts of the year Three-day no-meeting schedule for engineers A one year PWA retrospective Supporting React Native How Pinterest runs Kafka at scale How switching our domain structure unlocked international growth PinSage: A new graph convolutional neural network for web-scale recommender systems Looking inside the technology that powers Pinterest Building a more inclusive way to search Building a real-time user action counting system for ads Goku: Building a scalable and high performant time series database system We’ll be back in 2019 with more updates from the team. Happy New Year!

Simplifying web deploys

Over the past six months, Pinterest has moved to a CI/CD model for our API and web layers, which has truly improved agility by reducing time between merge and production. Prior to…

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…

Interest Taxonomy: A knowledge graph management system for content understanding at Pinterest

Interest Taxonomy at Pinterest We recently began rolling out the beta version of Pinterest Trends, a new tool that gives a view of the top U.S. search terms on Pinterest within the past 12 months, and a look into when search terms peak for…

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…

Building a real-time user action counting system for ads

The Pinterest ads team’s mission is to provide the best experience for both Pinners and advertisers. Our ads system is a real-time bidding system that delivers targeted ads based on a variety of attributes. One…

Cómo redujimos el tamaño de la aplicación de Pinterest para iOS en más de un 30% / 50 MB

This blog was originally published in English. To read the English version, click here. Todos sabemos que el tamaño de las aplicaciones es importante (el tamaño de descarga[1] y el tamaño de instalación local[2]). Además, existe una correlación…

Administrar videos en Android

La función de video se lanzó en la aplicación de Pinterest para Android en 2016 a fin de ofrecer una experiencia de video completamente integrada en la aplicación. Esto incluía la capacidad de admitir varios videos por pantalla…

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…

Building Expanded Targeting for Pinterest Ads

With more than 300 million people coming to Pinterest each month, Pinterest offers unique opportunities for advertisers to get their products in front of people with commercial intent. Similar to other platforms, Pinterest offers a variety of advertising targeting products¹. Advertisers can…

Faster Creator Content Distribution at Pinterest

At Pinterest, we are committed to building the best experience for creators to reach and inspire new audiences and for Pinners to easily discover the best ideas for them. We believe more diverse Pin formats and an efficient distribution system that builds a…

PinSage: A new graph convolutional neural network for web-scale recommender systems

Deep learning methods have achieved unprecedented performance on a broad range of machine learning and artificial intelligence tasks like visual recognition, speech recognition and machine translation. However, despite amazing progress, deep learning research has mainly focused on data defined on Euclidean domains, such…

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…

Automating Shop The Look on Pinterest

Every day, people come to Pinterest to discover new ideas — and when they find a product they want to buy, it should be easy to purchase it. In home decor specifically, millions of people come to Pinterest to find inspiration. That’s why in 2017…

Adventures in big data wonderland: Going down the Pinterest Path

Have you ever started looking for plants on Pinterest, only to end up shopping for pillows instead? Ever find yourself layers of Pins deep into finding a new idea, not sure of how you got there or where you started? When Pinners are in…