VIDEO | Pinterest Head of Data Engineering: Under the Covers, Pinterest Has a Massive Machine Learning Engine

(US and Canada) Pinterest’s Head of Data Engineering Dave Burgess speaks with Robert Lutton. Vice President at Sandhill Consultants and Editorial Board Vice Chair of CDO Magazine, in a video interview about his journey as a professional, his role at Pinterest, and the importance of modernizing data architecture.

Burgess has a background in mathematics, physics, and computer science, He has worked with IBM, Yahoo, Twilio, and several startups over the years in the space of data, management, and technology. Describing Pinterest, he says that it is a visual discovery engine to inspire people to create a life they love.

The platform has over 200 billion ideas for recipes, home hacks, style inspiration, and others and more than 450 million people use Pinterest every month. Burgess mentions that under the covers, Pinterest is just a massive machine learning engine that generates recommendations for search results, related products, advertising, and even augmented reality for users.

When asked about the importance of modernizing data architecture for organizations, Burgess says that it is essential for democratizing data so that everyone in the company can use data to make decisions, build applications, and experiment. At Pinterest, it significantly improves agility, developer productivity, and the products for customers.

Pinterest has also built a machine learning experimentation platform to increase velocity ML velocity by 10x and as Burgess states, it is foundational for running the business at scale. The company now has more than 50 major use cases for machine learning, it conducts about 400 million machine learning inferences per second, collects more than 50 million events per second, and stores an exabyte of data. All of this is impossible without a good modern data architecture.

Burgess further mentions that it also saves money by driving the focus on infrastructure, efficiency, and sustainability. The company saves about 20 percent of our infrastructure costs every year by optimizations to its code and running on the latest hardware.

CDO Magazine appreciates Dave Burgess for sharing his insights and data success stories with our global community.