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…

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…

Pinterest Flink Deployment Framework

Background At Pinterest, stream processing allows us to unlock value from real time data for pinners and partners. The Stream Processing Platform team is working on building a reliable and scalable platform to support many critical streaming applications including real-time experiment analytics…

Trusting Metrics at Pinterest

Pinterest, like many tech companies, relies heavily on data to help inform decisions and power machine learning. This strategy fundamentally depends on the data being accurate. Over the years we’ve worked to improve the processes behind trusting core decision-making data and ensure metrics remain accurate. How Data Can Go Wrong …

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…

Building Pin stats

A few months back, we started building a way for businesses to create and showcase their latest and favorite content on their profiles. We also wanted to make it easier for businesses to understand how their Pins are performing. If a business can…

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…

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…

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…

Secret management in multi-tenant environments

Knox, Pinterest’s open-source secret management service, now supports SPIFFE x509 identity documents as an authentication method. This update enables Knox to manage secrets in multi-tenant environments like Kubernetes. Knox is widely used across Pinterest’s infrastructure to provision secrets into production systems. In an…

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…

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…

Setting Up Snowflake Secondary Roles with Tableau

At Pinterest, we heavily utilize Tableau for our enterprise analytics. In an effort to secure access of sensitive data to the appropriate business units, we moved the enterprise data into a Snowflake data warehouse. Using Snowflake as a data platform, we can create and manage…

Goku: Building a scalable and high performant time series database system

Co-authored by Jinghan Xu, Jian Wang & Tian-Ying Chang, Engineers At Pinterest, developers rely on Statsboard to monitor their systems and discover issues. A reliable and efficient monitoring system is very important for development velocity. Historically, we’ve used OpenTSDB to ingest and…

Introducing Pinqueue3.0, Pinterest’s next-gen content moderation platform

In 2016, we reached a milestone of launching Pinqueue2.0, which has since become the go-to content moderation tool for the engineering, community, and data science teams. One of our top priorities at Pinterest is fostering a safe and trustworthy experience for all…

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…

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…

Developing fast & reliable iOS builds at Pinterest (Part one)

At Pinterest we’re focused on helping people discover inspiring ideas, from dinner recipes to try, home and style products to buy, to places to travel. Building the best products for mobile is a critical part of that, with 80% of all Pinners…

Three-day no-meeting schedule for engineers

About 100 days ago, our product engineering team began experimenting with a three-day no-meeting schedule for individual contributors on our teams. It’s not a big revelation that software development requires long stretches of uninterrupted time to focus. As Pinterest has grown…

How We Protect Pinners’ Passwords

Aalaa Satti | Software Engineer Amine Kamel | Head of Production Security At Pinterest, one method by which we ensure account security is through protecting Pinners’ passwords. Passwords can be problematic for a variety of reasons, including the fact that people tend to reuse their…

Real-time experiment analytics at Pinterest using Apache Flink

At Pinterest, we run thousands of experiments every day, and rely mostly on daily metrics to evaluate performance. The daily pipelines can take 10+ hours to run and sometimes are delayed, which has created some inconvenience in verifying the setup of…

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. …

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…

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…

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…