Pinterest Engineering Engineering Blog

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Pinterest Engineering shares how the team builds visual discovery and recommendation systems at massive scale. Posts cover machine learning for image understanding, search ranking, ads infrastructure, real-time data pipelines, and the platform serving 450M+ monthly users discovering ideas across billions of Pins.

Machine LearningVisual SearchRecommendationsData Pipelines

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Pinterest Engineering10 min18d ago

Building an MCP Ecosystem at Pinterest

Tan Wang | Software Engineer, Agent FoundationsOver the last year, Pinterest has gone from “MCP sounds interesting” to running a growing ecosystem of Model...

BackendAI

Model Context Protocol (MCP)gRPCAPI DesignMicroservices

Pinterest Engineering19 minMar 6, 2026

Unified Context-Intent Embeddings for Scalable Text-to-SQL

Your Analysts Already Wrote the Perfect PromptAuthors: Keqiang Li, Bin YangIn our previous blog post, we shared how Pinterest built Text-to-SQL with RAG-based...

DatabasesPerformanceBackendAI

Pinterest Engineering7 minMar 3, 2026

Unifying Ads Engagement Modeling Across Pinterest Surfaces

Authors: Duna Zhan | Machine Learning Engineer II; Qifei Shen | Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer; Matt Meng | Staff Machine Learning Engineer; Jiacheng...

BackendAI

Machine LearningAPI Design

Pinterest Engineering10 minFeb 27, 2026

Bridging the Gap: Diagnosing Online–Offline Discrepancy in Pinterest’s L1 Conversion Models

Authors: Yao Cheng | Senior Machine Learning Engineer; Qingmengting Wang | Machine Learning Engineer II; Yuanlu Bai | Machine Learning Engineer II; Yuan Wang |...

BackendAI

PostgreSQLPythonData PipelineMachine LearningModel DeploymentDevOpsOnline-Offline System

Pinterest Engineering11 minFeb 24, 2026

Piqama: Pinterest Quota Management Ecosystem

Authors: Junkai Xue | Sr Staff Software Engineer, Big Data Processing Platform; Zheyu Zha | Staff Software Engineer, Big Data Processing Platform; Jia Zhan |...

Backend

KafkaApache CassandraThriftJavaQuota ManagementScalabilityBig Data ProcessingSystem ArchitectureEcosystem Design

Pinterest Engineering15 minFeb 17, 2026

Drastically Reducing Out-of-Memory Errors in Apache Spark at Pinterest

Felix Loesing | Software EngineerIn 2025, we set out to drastically reduce out-of-memory errors (OOMs) and cut resource usage in our Spark applications by...

Backend

Apache SparkSparkMemory OptimizationResource UtilizationError HandlingCloud Computing

Pinterest Engineering5 minFeb 13, 2026

GPU-Serving Two-Tower Models for Lightweight Ads Engagement Prediction

Yuanlu Bai | Machine Learning Engineer II, L1 Conversion and Shopping Modeling; Yao Cheng | Sr. Machine Learning Engineer, L1 Conversion and Shopping Modeling;...

GPUServingTwo-Tower ModelsTensorFlowKubernetesAI/MLRealtime PredictionLightweight ApplicationsModel Serving

Pinterest Engineering10 minFeb 5, 2026

Next Generation DB Ingestion at Pinterest

Liang Mou | Staff Software Engineer, Logging PlatformYisheng Zhou | Software Engineer II, Logging PlatformElizabeth (Vi) Nguyen | Software Engineer I, Logging...

Backend

PostgreSQLApache KafkaApache BeamApache FlinkLogstashDatabase IngestionData PipelineData IntegrationBig DataLog Management

Pinterest Engineering10 minFeb 2, 2026

Beyond Two Towers: Re-architecting the Serving Stack for Next-Gen Ads Lightweight Ranking Models…

Beyond Two Towers: Re-architecting the Serving Stack for Next-Gen Ads Lightweight Ranking Models (Part 1)Authors: Xiao Yang | Senior Staff Machine Learning...

Distributed TrainingPyTorchXGBoostLightGBMTensorFlowLightweight ModelsRe-architectingMachine Learning EngineeringServing StackAI/ML Model Optimization

Pinterest Engineering10 minJan 28, 2026

Ads Candidate Generation using Behavioral Sequence Modeling

Lakshmi Manoharan | Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Ads Vertical Modeling; Karthik Jayasurya | Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Ads Signals ; Ziwei Guo |...

Machine LearningBehavioral Sequence ModelingPythonPyTorchTensorFlowAPI DesignData PipelineMachine Learning EngineeringSignal ProcessingSequence Modeling