VIDEO | Pinterest Head of Data Engineering: We Want Inquisitive People Who Want to Figure Out Problems

(US and Canada) Dave Burgess, Pinterest Head of Data Engineering, speaks with Robert Lutton, Vice President at Sandhill Consultants and CDO Magazine Editorial Board Vice Chair, in a video interview about transforming organizations into data-driven businesses, developing talent, and applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to solve business problems.

Sharing advice for organizations planning to modernize their data architecture and become more data-driven, Burgess mentions the following points:

• Start with enthusiastic people who will become your evangelists over time.
• Allow everyone to provide their requirements, pain points, and feedback so you can involve them in the process and get the buy-in.
• Find the right business problem to solve to positively impact the business and customers.
• Collaborate with an enthusiastic business partner.

Burgess says he sets audacious goals that motivate teams to try and leapfrog. He speaks about one such goal he set — to make ML engineers 10 times as productive with the organization’s machine learning platform. The success led everyone at Pinterest to want to adopt the ML platform.

When asked about critical skills for hiring people, Burgess says he wants them to be motivated, have a great attitude, and be curious about problems and how to solve them. As he points out, the people being interviewed can solve problems in any language, but what matters is their aptitude to do so. He adds that the organization is willing to train people and has several ways to develop talent.

Burgess also speaks about applying AI or ML for business. He reveals that Pinterest has over 50 machine learning use cases involving product recommendations, related pins, content recommendations, the advertising platform, image recognition, generative AI for images, and code generation. ML can also be used for spam filtering to identify and block content and accounts that do not meet Pinterest’s trust and safety standards.

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

See more from Dave Burgess

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