The next era of Bug Bounty at Pinterest

When a security researcher discovers a bug in a piece of software, the responsible thing to do is inform the company so they can fix it. And so platforms like Pinterest need to provide clear and actionable programs, typically with rewards or recognition, for those with valid reports. For us, that’s come in the form of responsible disclosure policies, which we’ve evolved over the years. We work with Bugcrowd to manage the program and integrate with their existing community of researchers, across a variety of Pinterest properties including pinterest.com subdomains (such as help.pinterest.com), mobile apps, browser extensions and open source projects. Since 2015 we’ve given monetary rewards (or “bounties”) to researchers and have continually raised those rewards. We leverage Bugcrowd’s vulnerability rating taxonomy to fairly assign rewards based on severity, which allows for a reasonable expectation of reward from researchers and helps to focus attention on the most impactful types of bugs. The program has been a big success. Hundreds of researchers have participated in the program. We’ve rewarded more than $35,000 to more than 150 valid non-duplicate submissions, and the highest single reward was $2,500. Today we’re once again announcing increased rewards for all tiers of bugs to show our continued commitment to responsible disclosure and researchers. If you’re a security researcher or developer interested in participating in our program, read the brief and terms on Bugcrowd, and join us.

Looking inside the technology that powers Pinterest

Pinterest began as a small startup, and has grown to a company that serves +175B Pins to +250M people. While we have one of the largest datasets online, we have 600+ engineers, and so technology needs to be accessible for each person to play their part in…

What we learned from an iOS app OOMs incident

In early 2020, we started seeing significantly elevated out-of-memory (OOM) crashes in the Pinterest iOS app. That incident resulted in a declined Crash-Free Users Rate (CFUR), from the previous 99% to 96%, which was a steep drop. What was going on? We improved…

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. …

How to Review Code as a Junior Developer

“Just ask questions.” That was the piece of advice that completely changed my perspective on code reviews. I first started as a Software Engineer at Pinterest on the Shopping Partner Experience team right out of college. I focused on my personal learning by reading documentation…

Optimizing Kafka for the cloud

Takeaways Developing locality aware systems and balancing algorithms can help substantially reduce cost Making Kafka Producer and Consumer rack aware helps efficiently route traffic Data-driven engineering decision making is critical to continuously improve systems One of the fundamental principles when operating in the…

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…

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…

Seven best practices for inclusive product design

At Pinterest, our mission is to help you discover and do what you love. We’re building a product for everyone, because the best Pinterest is inclusive and easily usable for people with all levels of abilities. That’s why today we’re sharing our…

Bottoms-Up: How the Pinterest growth team decentralizes team structure

On the growth team at Pinterest, we describe our structure as “bottoms-up”, meaning ideas and responsibilities flow throughout the team in a way that provides a lot of autonomy to work on the projects each person wants to tackle, across a variety of roles. The…

Unifying visual embeddings for visual search at Pinterest

Throughout the years, Pinterest has launched a variety of visual search products powered by computer vision to help people discover new ideas to try and products to buy. We started in 2015 with our visual cropping tool, allowing users to search within…

GokuL: Extending time series data storage to serve beyond one day

At Pinterest, developers rely heavily on Statsboard to monitor their systems and get alerted when issues happen. Last year, we introduced our time series database (aka Goku) which stores and serves the most recent one day’s…

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!

Ad Metrics Quality and Testing on Mobile

Every day at Pinterest, we help our advertising partners reach Pinners through different ad formats, and we provide them with metrics and analytics on how their ads are performing. Maintaining our partners’ trust and delivering value is critical, so the metrics we expose…

Powering Pinterest ads analytics with Apache Druid

The Change When we launched Promoted Pins in 2014, we chose Apache HBase as our database to store and serve all of our reporting metrics. At the beginning of our ads business, this was an appropriate choice because…

Four lessons in making Pinterest faster on Android

As engineers, we intuitively know that a faster app is a better experience for Pinners, but we also have proof that when web pages load faster, user growth improves. Last year, we doubled down on performance across our platforms so…

Shallow Mirror

Henry Cai | Software Engineer, Data Engineering Pinterest uses Kafka as the backbone for data transportation. As a part of our infrastructure, Kafka MirrorMaker v1 is used to replicate traffic among different Kafka clusters spread across multiple regions. Kafka MirrorMaker is a powerful tool to replicate/aggregate data between different Kafka…

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…

Automated cluster management and recovery for Rocksplicator

Rocksplicator at Pinterest Rocksplicator (github) was open sourced by Pinterest one and half years ago. It was designed to solve common problems of building large-scale online stateful data systems on commodity hardware, such as RocksDB replication and request routing. Technical details about how Rocksplicator solves…

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…

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…

Building interactive email with AMP

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is an open source technology created by Google to support fast mobile web pages. Over the years, we’ve partnered with Google and adopted AMP technology in our mobile web pages to deliver a faster, more efficient user experience. Most…

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…

Building board archiving and sorting

Connor Montgomery | Software engineer, Product Engineering A Pinterest tradition we’ve had since our early days is the Make-a-thon, our twist on a hackathon. Make-a-thons bring together employees from different disciplines to build something new. In the past, we’ve had projects range from scaling hacks to AR prototypes to…

HierTCN: Deep learning models for dynamic recommendations and inferring user interests

As we build a visual discovery engine, it’s crucial to understand user intent and serve relevant content through recommender systems that constantly learn from a cross-section of data to dynamically predict the next idea a Pinner will love. However, we found…