Ever wonder what it’s like to work in Machine Learning at Pinterest? What are some of the key benefits of working at the company and what would your day look like? To answer both of these questions, we caught up with Aaliyah Phillips, Sourcing Lead, and Max Harper, Senior Machine Learning Engineer. Aaliyah deep dives on the benefits of our flexible work model while Max takes you through a day in his life working at Pinterest.
When you think about your dream job, what comes to mind? As a recruiter here at Pinterest, I hear a lot of similar responses when people share what they’re looking for in their next career move:
Number three is always my favorite to discuss with candidates, as it’s been one of the best parts of working at Pinterest. We call it PinFlex: It promotes flexibility while prioritizing in-person moments to celebrate our culture and drive inspiration.
When the company announced PinFlex, I was so excited. It had always been a personal life goal of mine to try something new and move to a new state. I’m a huge beach person and was thrilled about the idea of living by a new coast in South Florida.
After discussing with my manager and HR, I packed up my bags, sold my furniture, and set off to be based in a 24/7 tropical paradise.
PinFlex also helps promote in-person collaboration, as we have yearly team onsites in San Francisco where the team comes together to collaborate and bond. This helps being remote not feel so isolating!
I feel more motivated than ever at work because I have the flexibility of not having to go to an office every day. Instead of a daily commute, I can use that time to find great talent, like you, reading this article! I also get to spend valuable time between meetings and calls bonding with my four month old Frenchie puppy, all thanks to PinFlex.
6:00am wake up. It's Friday, summer in Seattle. It gets light at 4:30am, so it's easy to wake up early. I like to get up and make coffee before my wife and two kids make their way downstairs. Once I've made the coffee, I solve today's games from LinkedIn and The New York Times (Connections is my favorite). I help my kids get fed, visit my neighborhood gym, and get ready for the day.
8:30 commute (upstairs). Most days, my commute involves going upstairs to my home office. Pinterest has a really nice office in downtown Seattle, and I take the bus to work once or twice a week. Today I'm working from home, as I prefer my home office for some of the things I see on my calendar, including an interview and focus time.
8:30 – 12:00 meetings + work mix. My morning is fragmented with a mix of meetings and unstructured time. I have a number of different projects that I'm working on, and this is a good chance to catch up with Slack messages and lighter project work. This morning, I spent time preparing for a meeting with the feature team by writing a list of questions about how they are using gen AI, in order to better understand what support they will need as they go through the review process. I'm also working on a project to integrate a text classifier I trained into some of Pinterest's recommendation features. I need to check the status of an indexing job that was scheduled to run overnight. It worked! I have a couple of meetings, including a practice mid-point presentation for my summer intern (she did great), and a 1:1 to help a teammate with some questions related to PySpark.
12:00 lunch. It's summer, so my kids are home. I enjoy spending time with them while I make my lunch.
1:00 interview. I meet with a job candidate to discuss a "ML Practitioner" question. I enjoy these types of interviews, as they are somewhat open-ended discussions of approaches to ML modeling. It's interesting to see how candidates apply their interests and experiences to provide solutions to realistic ML modeling challenges. Right after the interview ends, I summarize my notes and send my feedback to the recruiting team.
2:15 – 5:30 deep work time. Focus time is my favorite time of the week. These chunks of time are my opportunity to make bigger steps of progress, to do creative work, or to work on more ambiguous, harder problems. My first priority today is to make progress on implementing A/B test triggering logic in the search codebase – a codebase that's owned by a different team and new to me – along with writing unit tests to verify the behavior. Also, I spend time reading about contrastive learning, and thinking about how it relates to my intern's project.
5:30 kid pickup. My kids have sports practices, time to bring them home.
6:30 Friday night! I often make pizza on Friday night, as has been my tradition for many years now. Today is no exception. I enjoy a beer with my wife while I prepare the pizza, and we enjoy the beginning of the weekend!
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