Leaving Pinterest today

Today's my last day at Pinterest. A journey comes to an end. Hopefully a new one begins also. I'm keeping a few memories from friends and team mates here. Looking back at the journey, the most important points were: 

  • I had the opportunity to mentor 6 promotions in 4 years:
    • Karthik (L5 to L6 MLE, now an L7 MLE Manager)
    • Lu (L5 to L6 to L7)
    • Heng (L4 to L5 to L6)
    • Qingxian (L4 to L5 MLE)
    • ... and there are more that should get promoted this year or the next.
  • I had the opportunity to indirectly influence the growth of my mentees:
    • Jeremy (then L5, now L6 in Security)
    • Deborah (then L4 in ML ranking)
    • Lily (then L4 in Data Analytics)
    • Jason, Chenqi, Anumol, Kanchi, Dinesh, Nishant and many others.
  • I had the opportunity to build and deploy one of the world's largest Flink clusters
    • Set up the infrastructure to support 20 million messages/s.
    • Train and upskill a 15 person team
    • Support 300+ engineers across 24+ teams. 
    • Deliver on the business critical path, on time and without being a blocker.
    • Define the black art of Flink job tuning, largely from personal experience.
    • Optimize the infrastructure by 75% ($XXM savings).
    • Present twice our learnings at Flink Forward (NRTG, Flink Job Tuning)
    • Win for Pinterest the Confluent Data Streaming award for the best streaming stack in the industry.
  • Our customers enjoyed working with us:
    • +56 NPS
    • 100+ pages of documentation and training written up and made available.
    • 5.5 hours of video recorded and made available for client use.
    • High stability bar: 1 production incident in 2022 (AWS AZ down). 
    • 0 production incidents in 2023 and 2024 (the platform with lowest downtime in all of Pinterest). 
    • High maturity bar: the platform hosts ~all major Tier 1 realtime usecases on the business critical paths. 
  • The total impact I had on the Pinterest bottom line:
    • $XXM in direct savings.
    • About 3% of total AWS spend. 
    • About 1.5% of total Pinterest revenue. 

After all this, the thing that I'm most proud of is what others say about me. Here's a small sample:


That said, it's time to move on. It's been a great run. Hope the next journey takes us to new and better places. Thanks everyone at Pinterest for being part of this journey together. I loved our time together. 


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