Spotlight on Zurich: Meet Kent Steer, Sr. Staff Software Engineer

In 2025, Pinterest announced that it would build an engineering excellence hub in Zurich. As the team continues to grow, we sat down with Kent Steer, Sr. Staff Software Engineer. Learn more about what excited him about Pinterest, his work on the PinCompute team and why you might consider an opportunity at Pinterest Zurich. 

What factors led you to choosing Pinterest?

Pinterest is a place for creativity and positivity, where people go to find ideas and inspiration they can take action on: build, shop or do. I wanted to contribute to that.

The tools available today are changing how we build. An interesting question, and one of the things that drew me to Pinterest, is what a platform looks like when it's built to make a company more effective with these new tools, while still producing systems that hold up in production at scale. Pinterest is genuinely investing in that. There's a willingness to experiment, to discover and to change. That's the environment I want to be in.

What were the engineering challenges or technical problems at Pinterest that genuinely excited you during the interview process?

What stood out in the interviews was how seriously people here are taking the way the engineer's role is changing. The tools we use, the way we build and operate systems, the patterns we lean on, all of that is in motion. There are a lot of unknowns, and a lot of room for new thinking. Pinterest is taking that transition seriously.

What the work looks like a year from now could be meaningfully different from today, and there's a real appetite here to figure out how to use these new capabilities well, to continue to build on a product experience for over 600 million users. That's an exciting opportunity.

What is PinCompute, and why does it matter to the product that hundreds of millions of people use every day?

PinCompute is Pinterest's internal compute platform. It's the foundation engineering teams build on. It handles where their code runs, how it scales, how it stays healthy and efficient.

It lets small teams operate critical systems without spending most of their time on infrastructure. When multiplied across the engineering organization it increases the rate at which the product improves for our users.

The other reason it matters is timing. AI is changing how engineers work, and the platform is what lets that change land in production safely. That's the part of platform work I find most interesting at this moment.

In your early weeks, what has your day-to-day experience been like working out of Pinterest Zurich?

What I noticed early on was an energy around growth and ideas for how Pinterest can continue building on its momentum. Among my onboarding cohort there was a lot of optimism and enthusiasm for the product and the workplace. Zurich is in a growth phase. New teams forming, new charters being defined, amazing new colleagues joining. We all work with teams across the globe, but the in-person experience has been a great place to share new findings, discuss proposals, and push each other's thinking.

What would you say to engineers who are curious about working at Pinterest in Zurich, and what do you wish you had known before joining?

I think anyone considering a new role should reset their expectations of the ramp-up experience. Agents with access to public and internal resources can put together a real onboarding plan and answer your questions as you go. It's the closest thing I've seen to having the company's most experienced engineers sit with you full time as you come up to speed.

Previously, changing roles or companies meant losing the benefits of familiarity and context. And while that is still true to some extent, the time it takes to gain new context has been significantly reduced.

Ready to elevate your career with confidence? Discover opportunities to join Pinterest Engineering.