An update on Pixie, Pinterest’s recommendation system

We recently welcomed engineers to our offices for our annual Mad Science Fair, where I shared the latest on Pixie, an advanced graph-based recommendation system. Here’s a recap of that talk, and you can find the video here. As Pinterest grows to more…

Understanding product attributes for shoppers

Every day, people come to Pinterest to shop and find ideas in categories like home and fashion, and it’s our responsibility to show them the most relevant and inspiring products. We measure relevance in a few different dimensions, but most importantly…

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…

Knit Con through an employee’s eyes

Originally published on Tobi’s personal blog. It’s not every day I get to spend two days with my coworkers making arepas, practicing Tai chi, learning how to plate dishes, and vibing to six different DJs. Two days immersing myself in the deepest caverns of…

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…

Managing Videos on Android

Video launched on the Pinterest Android app in 2016 with the goal of bringing a seamless video experience to the app. This included the ability to support multiple videos per screen, while dynamically controlling their playback state by automatically pausing them when they’ve scrolled…

Building a Kubernetes platform at Pinterest

Why Kubernetes? Over the years, 300 million Pinners have saved more than 200 billion Pins on Pinterest across more than 4 billion boards. To serve this vast user base and content pool…

Understanding Pins through keyword extraction

Pinterest is well known for its visual discovery engine, but much of our content is also accompanied by text. As a result, it’s important for us to be able to understand text to ensure we recommend relevant ideas to Pinners. In this blog post…

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…

Privacy Power-Up: Upgrading Pin Links from HTTP to HTTPS

HTTPS should be everywhere. Your website likely runs over HTTPS, giving your users a secure, encrypted connection, but what about all the outbound links? Can you guarantee that they all use HTTPS? In this post, we describe the steps we took…

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…

Pinterest + ktlint = ❤

It’s been nearly a year since Pinterest’s Android codebase became Kotlin-first, and about two years since we adopted ktlint for Kotlin linting and formatting. Today, we’re sharing that Pinterest has officially taken ownership over the project. Initially, we chose ktlint because of its…

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…

Open sourcing Querybook, Pinterest’s collaborative big data hub

Charlie Gu | Tech Lead, Analytics Platform, Lena Ryoo | Software Engineer, Analytics Platform, and Justin Mejorada-Pier | Engineering Manager, Analytics Platform With more than 300 billion Pins, Pinterest is powering an ever-growing and unique dataset that maps interests, ideas…

A Pinterest Engineering guide to technical interviews

Technical interviews are the key component to landing an engineering role. Everything from preparation to asking the right questions is important for a successful interview. In this post, Pinterest employees from Recruiting and Engineering share tips and tricks for…

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…

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…

The evolution of search at Pinterest

When Pinterest first launched it provided a new way for people to collect and organize ideas from around the web. What started as a place to save though, quickly became a unique service for discovery where Pinners could draw inspiration from each other, brands and…

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…

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…

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…

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!

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…

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…