My Summer as a Software Engineering Intern at Pinterest Toronto!
Khubi Shah | (former) Software Engineer Intern, Shopping Content Mining
This summer, I had the incredible opportunity to intern at the one and only Pinterest from the new engineering hub in Toronto!
I am a final year undergraduate student from the University of Waterloo, majoring in Computer Science with an AI specialization. Growing up, Pinterest was always my go-to social media platform, as it inspired me with new ideas for food, fashion, design, or anything creative! As a result, when I was given the opportunity to join as a Software Engineering Intern this summer in Toronto, I was beyond thrilled to be a part of the company mission: to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love through visual discovery.
The Application Process
In all honesty, this was the type of internship that I had been working towards ever since I was in university. I knew I wanted to work as a software engineering intern on a team that leveraged machine learning for fascinating real-world applications, so I did what I could to bolster not only my resume, but also my personal experience so I would be ready to tackle such a challenge. Therefore, I completed multiple computer science and software engineering courses, machine learning and artificial intelligence courses, developed my algorithmic problem-solving skills through Leetcode, and gained prior internship experience in software engineering. I found this specific role through LinkedIn, and after a seamless interview process (online coding challenge + technical phone call interview with the hiring manager), I received a very exciting phone call from the recruiter!
Team Placement
I joined as a Software Engineering Intern on the Shopping Content Mining team (SCM) based in Toronto. SCM is one of the Pinterest Shopping teams that is leveraging machine learning along with other data extraction techniques in order to advance Pinterest’s shopping capabilities.
For example, if a consumer finds a nice chair on Pinterest, the work of the SCM team ensures that all the product information for that chair from the merchant website, such as title, price, and availability, is directly available on Pinterest. This enables Pinners to easily convert a visual inspiration into a successful purchase.
The Structure of Pinternships
Pinternships are structured so that each intern is assigned a project to work on throughout their internship. As for me, I had the opportunity to collaborate with two other engineers on my team to build a model management system as a replacement to the decentralized and manual process being used prior. Our project enabled the overall process of model management to become much more efficient, centralized, and automated. Not only did it help save a substantial amount of time for our team, but in the long run, the centralized model management system project will enable our team to scale our shopping data extraction work, so even more Pinterest pins can be enriched with highly reliable purchase information. Of course there is much more that can be done to enhance the system, but I am glad to say that this project laid the groundwork for future development.
A Typical Day as a Pintern
As a primarily remote intern, my weekly routine started with a virtual Agile sprint planning and project sync meeting every Monday with my team. Once we figured out what our goals were for the sprint in terms of tasks, the remainder of the week was spent completing mostly independent work, along with some collaborative work with my mentor and the other two team engineers who were directly working with me. The timing flexibility and zero-commute aspects of remote work were awesome! Some rituals that I followed to make remote work more engaging were setting up virtual coffee chats with other Pinterest employees and going on nature walks when I was stuck on a problem.
The Learning and Networking Experience
One thing that I really liked about working at Pinterest this summer was how I was treated as a full-time employee in terms of being given full ownership of tasks and features, while at the same time, I still received a lot of valuable mentorship from some of the smartest and knowledgeable engineers that I’ve worked with. This included thorough technical mentorship from my assigned mentor and other engineers that were working on the same project with me, high-level project vision and career mentorship from my manager, and career mentorship from my new grad buddies. I had the opportunity to take on a wide range of technical tasks, from owning new features for my project, brainstorming with front-end engineers on UI design, performing end-to-end feature testing, preparing high-level software engineering design documents, and leading design reviews for my work.
Outside of expanding my abilities in software engineering and architecture, I learned a great deal of other important skills during my internship. Specifically, I gained more confidence in speaking up in meetings, presenting my work to others, leading my own meetings, crafting clearly written technical discussion, and networking with fellow Pinployees. While most days were remote, because of Pinterest’s flexible work policy called PinFlex, I still had the opportunity to meet up with my team about once a month in the office and enjoy fun outings with them like our happy hours!
There were also a lot of fun events and opportunities to meet fellow interns and other Pinterest employees. Some of my favorites were the Pintern social hours, virtual escape rooms, trivia events, and a virtual pottery-making session!
Concluding Thoughts
As my 16-week internship here at Pinterest comes to an end, I am glad to say that I have grown immensely as a software engineer through my experience this summer as a Pintern. I am very grateful for all the people that I have met and learned from, and I look forward to continuing to grow my skills in the future (hopefully with more opportunities like this!).
If you’re interested in any internship opportunities at Pinterest, please apply here!
Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank several individuals that made the internship experience as awesome as it was. These would be:
- My technical mentors Charles Huang and Yu Qian for all their valuable advice that has helped me grow as a software engineer
- My team manager Patrick Halina for giving me the opportunity to intern on his team and providing a lot of high-level project and career guidance
- My project’s UI/UX engineer Cesar Fredy Gil Mejia for extensively collaborating with me to build out my project features
- The whole SCM team for being a pleasure to work with
- My new grad buddies Boris Lin and Jennifer Kong for all their valuable career mentorship
- My recruiter Shannel Evans for a seamless recruitment process
- Olivia Berkowitz, Sabrina Ham and rest of the University Recruiting Team for designing such a well-structured and fun internship experience
To learn more about engineering at Pinterest, check out the rest of our Engineering Blog, and visit our Pinterest Labs site. To explore life at Pinterest, visit our Careers page.
