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…

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…

Building a Label-Based Enforcement Pipeline for Trust & Safety

As Pinterest grows with increasing numbers of users and businesses, providing a safe and trustworthy experience is one of our top priorities. Every day the platform serves billions of Pins and boards to inspire Pinners. With so many Pins and activity, It can…

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…

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…

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…

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…

How Pinterest runs Kafka at scale

Pinterest runs one of the largest Kafka deployments in the cloud. We use Apache Kafka extensively as a message bus to transport data and to power real-time streaming services, ultimately helping more than 250 million Pinners around the world discover and do what…

El fantástico Fixathon

Los ingenieros de Pinterest siempre están enfocados en hacer lo mejor para el producto, pero trabajar en una base de código limpia, con buen mantenimiento y relativamente libre de errores transforma las tareas de ingeniería de ser “solo trabajo” a oportunidades agradables para…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 the Pinterest app for Windows 10

Solving a user problem As we focus on developing ways to help Pinners find inspiration across all interests, locations and platforms, we knew we had to improve the experience for Windows. Accessing Pinterest from desktop requires using a browser, often times with numerous tabs…

How we increased engagement using automatic personalized copy testing

Think about the last time you visited a website. Was there a word that helped draw you in? Now think about how that might be different if you spoke a different language, were a different age or grew up in a different part of…

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…

Pin2Interest: A scalable system for content classification

Content understanding is at the core of any great recommendation system. By knowing what each Pin is about, Pinterest can connect Pinners with the most relevant and inspiring content that best matches their interests. Taxonomy of interests The Interest Taxonomy captures popular concepts that appear within Pinterest…

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!

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.

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…

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 …