Lin Zhu | Sr. Staff Machine Learning Engineer; Manan Kalra | Machine Learning Engineer II; Logan Jeon | Sr. Machine Learning Engineer; Ye Liu | Staff Machine Learning Engineer; Xiangyi Chen | Sr. Machine Learning Engineer; Jaewon Yang | Principal Machine Learning Engineer; Jinwen Xu | Manager II, Machine Learning Engineering; Tingting Zhu | Sr. Manager, Engineering; Sudarshan Lamkhede | Director, Machine Learning EngineeringPinterest is built to get inspired and then turn the inspiration into realization — a dinner, a renovation, a wedding, a new skill. That only works if we understand more…
Michele Ceccacci; Software Engineer I | Jason Coffman; Sr. Software Engineer | Colm O’Shaughnessy; Software Engineer II | Laura Palmer; Staff Product Manager | Adam Podraza; Manager, Engineering | Surya Karri; Manager, EngineeringAt Pinterest, reliable and trustworthy metrics are behind every decision: from measuring company-wide business performance to evaluating each feature experiment results. Hundreds of data producers — analysts, data scientists, and engineers across Pinterest — create thousands of metrics from our petabyte scale data lake. A metrics ecosystem this size can’t be ad hoc;…
Qianrui Zhang | Sr Software Engineer, Logging PlatformKanchi Masalia | Software Engineer II, Stream Processing PlatformLiang Mou | Sr Staff Software Engineer, Logging PlatformYi Pan | Principal Engineer, Agent PlatformIntroductionThis is the third post in our series on Pinterest’s next-generation database ingestion framework. Part 1 introduced the DB ingestion framework built on Kafka, Flink, Spark, and Iceberg, and Part 2 covered automated schema evolution. This post tackles another challenge in migrating downstream customers to the new ingestion framework: knowing when data is complete…
Authors: Longyu Zhao (Staff Machine Learning Engineer), Gwendolyn Zhao (Staff Machine Learning Engineer), Peng Yan (Senior Machine Learning Engineer), Yuanlu Bai (Senior Machine Learning Engineer), Yuan Wang (Senior Machine Learning Engineer), Yao Cheng (Staff Machine Learning Engineer), Ang Xu (Principal Machine Learning Engineer), Zhaohong Han (Manager II, Ads Lightweight Ranking)IntroductionPreviously¹, we launched the next-generation serving stack for standard ads, which we call Nexus. Nexus decoupled candidate generation from scoring and moved us beyond the classic two-tower-only world,…
Authors: Bowen Zhou | Staff Software Engineer; Shan Gao | Senior Software Engineer; Jingwen Hu | Software Engineer II; Wenjiang Chu | Staff Software EngineerThe Billion-Embedding ChallengeAt Pinterest, the “signal” is our lifeblood. Whether it’s a home decor enthusiast finding the perfect rug or a fashion seeker discovering a new aesthetic, our discovery engine relies on understanding deep semantic relationships to help our users find inspirations. Over the last few years, the explosive growth of embedding-based retrieval has fundamentally transformed how we surface these signals — and at the…
Lei Pan | Senior Software Engineer; Salina Wu | Senior Software Engineer; Cristian Lopez | Software Engineer I; Guangtong Bai | Staff Software Engineer; Soam Acharya | Principal Engineer; Saurabh Vishwas Joshi | Principal Engineer; Chia-Wei Chen | Staff Software Engineer; Ambud Sharma | Principal EngineerWhy VLM Serving Matters at PinterestPinterest is a visual search and discovery platform, so its AI systems must reason over both language and visual content. Vision-language models (VLMs), which can interpret images, compare visual candidates, and respond naturally to user intent, are…
John Grass | Sr. Manager, EngineeringA Fundamental TransformationAn AI team is fundamentally more than just a group whose members incorporate AI tools into their existing workflows. The journey to becoming an AI team necessitates a fundamental and comprehensive paradigm shift in how the team defines ownership, engages in strategic planning, and, most critically, executes on its core goals and objectives. This transformation is not merely an addition of new technology; it is a restructuring of the team’s operating model, philosophy, and individual roles.Becoming an AI team requires a holistic…
Devin Kreuzer | Sr. Machine Learning Engineer; Yichi Wang | Machine Learning Engineer I; Sujan Reddy Ale | Machine Learning Engineer I; Zelun Wang | Sr. Machine Learning Engineer; Hongtao Lin | Sr. Machine Learning Engineer; Piyush Maheshwari | Staff Machine Learning EngineerPinterest home feed candidate generation is a large-scale User-to-Pin retrieval problem. A common approach is a two-tower model: a user tower encodes the user, an item tower encodes candidate Pins, and approximate nearest neighbor search retrieves Pins close to the user embedding. But Pinterest users often have multiple…
Part 1 of 2AuthorsPersonalization (Homefeed): Yuke Yan, Chuxi Wang, Andreanne Lemay, Olafur Gudmundsson, Anna Kiyantseva, Krystal Benitez, Jongho Kim, Jiacong He, Rahul Goutam, James Li, Dylan WangUser Understanding: Simin Li, Sufyan Suliman, Yingjian Ding, Hongbo DengData Science: Armando Ordorica, Yan Chen, Ellie Zhang, Karim WahbaIntroductionPinterest’s mission is to help people discover the inspiration to create a life they love. Our recommendation system serves hundreds of millions of users, surfacing billions of Pins across interests ranging from home renovation to meal planning to…
Ammar Ekbote | Senior Software EngineerChan Kim | Senior Software EngineerManaging Infrastructure as Code (IaC) across a massive organization comes with a unique set of security and logistical challenges, particularly when operating within a distributed, multi-repository architecture. At Pinterest, we designed the Resource Provisioner Pipeline (RPP), our specialized, proprietary Terraform execution engine to safely manage both critical and non-critical infrastructure changes.In this post, we will look under the hood of the first iteration of the RPP system. We will explore how it established…
Sheng Huang | Software Engineer, AI Platform; Pong Eksombatchai | Machine Learning Engineer, Applied Sciences; Saurabh Vishwas Joshi | Software Engineer, AI Platform; Gaurav Arora | Software Engineer, AI Platform; Karthik Anantha Padmanabhan | Engineering Director, AI PlatformAt Pinterest, foundation models power recommendations for over 600 million monthly active users. Our latest Foundation Model (ACM RecSys 2025) pre-trains on two years of user activity data and is deployed into Home feed and Related Pins ranking, the platform’s two most important recommendation systems. Multi-node…
Yisheng Zhou | Software Engineer IILiang Mou | Sr Staff Software EngineerGabriel Raphael Garcia Montoya | Staff Software EngineerIstvan Podor | Staff Software EngineerIntroductionIn the first post of this series, we introduced Pinterest’s next-generation CDC-based ingestion platform built on Kafka, Flink, Spark, and Iceberg. In production, upstream schemas are constantly evolving, and in a distributed CDC pipeline, schema is not just metadata — it is a cross-system contract spanning ingestion, transformation, storage, and historical backfill. A schema change that is not handled carefully can…
Authors (listed alphabetically)Ads Feature Engineering Infra team: Ajay Venkatakrishnan, Le ZhangCore ML Infra team: Eric Shang, Pihui WeiML Data team: Connor Votroubek, Yi HeUser Understanding team: Camilo Munoz, Simin LiIf you work on ranking, retrieval, or recommendation systems, you’ve probably asked for some version of the same thing: “Give me the last N meaningful actions this user took, with the right enrichments, in a format that’s easy to train and serve ML models.”On paper, that sounds simple. In practice, “user sequences” often become one of the most expensive and fragile parts of…
An Engineer’s Guide to Better AI Skills: Implementing a Testing Process to Optimize Agent Performance in Any Repository or SkillAuthor: Daniel ReedThe tech industry is currently seeing a massive overhaul in the way we work and many are enjoying the benefits of AI agents, particularly when automating engineer workflows and serving domain-specific knowledge. However, relying on agents to consistently invoke a custom skill can be surprisingly unreliable at times.When adopting a new skill intended to help agents write code for Pinterest’s iOS architecture (I’ll call it rx-mvvm) we discovered that…
Guangtong Bai | Staff Software Engineer, Product ML Infrastructure*; Shantam Shorewala | Software Engineer II, Product ML Infrastructure*; Chi Zhang | Staff Software Engineer, AI Platform*; Neha Upadhyay | Software Engineer II, AI Platform*; Haoyang Li | Director, Product ML Infrastructure*These authors contributed equally to this article.BackgroundAt Pinterest, our online ML serving systems employ a root-leaf architecture. On a high level, the architecture looks as follows:Figure 1: Root-leaf Architecture of Online ML Serving Systems at PinterestIn the diagram, “Client Service” is…
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