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…

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…

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…

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…

Supporting React Native at Pinterest

Early last year, a small group of engineers started investigating the possibility of adopting React Native at Pinterest. We’ve been following the ecosystem with interest since it was first open-sourced in 2015. Since then, a robust community has developed around it, and it’s been…

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…

Pinterest + ktlint = ❤

Ha pasado casi un año desde que la base de código Android de Pinterest se convirtió en la prioridad de Kotlin, y aproximadamente dos años desde que adoptamos ktlint para el formato y lint de Kotlin. Hoy, compartimos que Pinterest se…

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…

Building Pin cohesion

At Pinterest, we’re building a visual discovery engine where ideas become actionable with links to more information. Once a Pin is saved, its linked content may be updated or expire over time, and so it’s critical to know…

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. …

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…

Improving HBase backup efficiency at Pinterest

Pinterest has one of the largest HBase production deployments in the industry. HBase is one of the foundational building blocks of our infrastructure and powers many of our critical services including our graph database (Zen), our general-purpose key-value store (UMS), our…

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…

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…

Introducing inclusive beauty searches for mobile

This week, we’re announcing skin tone ranges is coming to iOS (followed by Android) so Pinners can discover relevant hair and makeup ideas. Over the coming weeks, when Pinners search for beauty ideas on their iPhone or iPad app, a palette representing a range of skin tones will appear. The palette enables them to personalized Pins and videos they see. By combining the latest in machine learning and inclusive product development, we’re able to directly respond to Pinner feedback and build a more useful product. Last year, nearly 60% of the top 100 search terms for skin-related searches involved a tone, such as dark skin, pale skin, and olive skin, which showed us women of all skin types wanted a way to customize their searches. Keep an eye out for a deeper look at the design process behind the product. Acknowledgements: Emma Herold, Lulu Cheng, Long Cheng, Yixue Li, Larkin Brown, Candice Morgan, Xixia Wang, and Laksh Bhasin.

API Profiling at Pinterest

When I walked into Pinterest on the first day of my internship and learned I’d be focusing on profiling the API Gateway service — the core backend service of the Pinterest product — my only thought was “What is profiling?”. Profiling is often shoved aside…

Building a universal search system for Pinterest

On Pinterest, the best answer goes beyond text, but can even go beyond an image too. When you’re looking for eye makeup ideas for example, a video personalized to your skin tone range teaching you how to create a certain look is likely…

How we built rearranging Pins

Listening to user feedback is essential to building a product Pinners love and use to discover and save ideas every day. Often, their feature requests present interesting technical challenges for our engineers. For example, today we launched the ability to…

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…

Using Kafka to throttle QPS on MySQL shards in bulk write APIs

At Pinterest, backend core services are in charge of various operations on pins, boards, and users from both Pinners and internal services. While Pinners’ operations are identified as online traffic because of real-time response, internal traffic is identified as offline because processing is…

What it’s like to interview at Pinterest

Interviews have traditionally been thought of as an unpleasant but necessary experience. Candidates often find them stressful and many come in having had poor interview experiences in the past. However, interviews are the clearest opportunity for companies to articulate and demonstrate…

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…

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…

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…

Hybrid Search: Building a textual and visual discovery experience at Pinterest

As a visual discovery engine, Pinterest helps you discover ideas even when you don’t know what you’re looking for, or have the words to describe it. Using a mix of technology (including visual search) and community input (thanks to the 175B+ Pins…