Geo-blocking media content on Pinterest

Pinterest engineers are tasked with showing Pinners the best ideas related to their interests, which includes taking into account signals like location. As part of these efforts, we built a video and image platform to enable a…

Scaling Kubernetes with Assurance at Pinterest

Introduction It has been more than a year since we shared our Kubernetes Journey at Pinterest. Since then, we have delivered many features to facilitate customer adoption, ensure reliability and scalability, and build up operational experience and best practices. In general, Kubernetes platform users gave…

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…

User state-based notification volume optimization

Notifications play an important role in helping Pinterest’s 335M+ monthly active users discover and engage with inspiring content. It’s crucial to send the right number of notifications with high quality content. If we send too few notifications, Pinners might miss out on great opportunities…

Building a more inclusive way to search

Every day, tens of millions of people search for ideas on Pinterest, whether it’s a recipe to cook for dinner that night or a new hairstyle to try over the weekend. According to a Pinterest study, 70 percent of people use Pinterest to…

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…

Refactoring Thrift schemas at Pinterest

The Pinterest tech stack consists of hundreds of microservices written in a variety of languages that use Apache Thrift to communicate with each other. Thrift schemas are used to define our service interfaces, constants and serialized data across all levels of the stack…

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…

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.

The Fantastic Fixathon

Engineers at Pinterest are always focused on doing what’s best for the product, but working in a codebase that’s clean, well-maintained, and relatively bug-free transforms engineering tasks from being “just work” to enjoyable opportunities to flex our skills. We’re also enriched as engineers, both technically and otherwise, when we take…

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…

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. …

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 the product cycle of discovery to purchase on Pinterest

Pinners have always used Pinterest for shopping, as they often come in a planning mindset and are exploring products and…

Improving data processing efficiency using partial deserialization of Thrift

At Pinterest we’ve worked to greatly improve data processing efficiency. One quote that resonates with our unique approach is from writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” Ultimately…

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…

Growth engineering meetup

Synopsis of the talks Paid growth @ Airbnb Ganesh Venkataraman discusses the various channels and techniques…

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…

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…

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…

How Pinterest runs Traffic-based Interlinking experiments for SEO

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is an important channel for people to find ideas and inspiration on Pinterest, and can also help expose new users to first use cases, such as hairstyle tutorials or a home office setup. …

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…

Real-time User Signal Serving for Feature Engineering

More than 320 million unique visitors come to Pinterest every month to discover inspiring content, which also gives advertisers a unique opportunity to get their products in front of people with commercial intent. Curation…

Detecting image similarity using Spark, LSH and TensorFlow

As a visual platform, the ability to learn from images to understand our content is important. In order to detect near-duplicate images we use the NearDup system, a Spark- and TensorFlow-based pipeline. At the core of the pipeline is a Spark implementation of batch…

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…