Prepare for Pinterest with a focused mix of coding, design, and communication. Start with your job description and confirm the interview loop with your recruiter.
01 / MAKE YOUR NEXT SESSION COUNT
Return a binary tree in level order. Compare an iterative queue with recursion and test an empty tree and a long chain.
A correct traversal, bounded auxiliary memory, and a clear explanation of the trade-off.
Merge two sorted arrays. Then adapt your solution when one array has enough unused space to hold both. Explain how you avoid overwriting unread values.
A maintained invariant, correct boundary handling, and justified complexity.
Describe a technical decision you changed after receiving feedback. Explain your contribution and the outcome.
Specific actions, honest reflection, and measurable impact.
BEFORE YOU PRACTICE
Get the details that a generic company guide cannot know.
Company-linked challenges and related lessons from our library. Not a prediction of your interview.
Aggregated from candidate submissions and public sources.
Historical figures from existing records; date and location may be unspecified. Verify current ranges on Levels.fyi.
L3
$220,313
$133,125 base · $69,688 stock · $17,500 bonus
L4
$277,088
$159,636 base · $104,634 stock · $12,818 bonus
L5
$498,286
$197,714 base · $293,429 stock · $7,143 bonus
L6
$582,500
$207,500 base · $368,750 stock · $6,250 bonus
L7
Not Available
4 reports from candidates who interviewed at Pinterest.
Reviews originally posted on Glassdoor.
Very "Pinteresty" environment, DIY, and artsy. Great for those who have a creative passion. Will have random fun events, KnitCon, and can attend studio nights taught by an employee. Lots of work to do, especially in ads and visual search. You will have a lot of impact with the work you do. Very methodical with growth, which leads to building a better product (w/ ads) - Ben, CEO, has a great vision & direction and is very inspirational. Biggest gripe is the amount of people who are not passionate about the company/product. Start developing engineers in house rather than hiring so many outside people, who also may not even care for the product. Also, start looking more at culture fit like other tech companies do.
There's lots of opportunity for individual engineers to make big impact (if you are ambitious). For example, two frontend developers created a new feature in their spare time, and it's going to be launched later this year. The company is still paying down some big tech debt, so product velocity has been slow for the past few years. Need faster execution. Amazon/Google/Instabook are innovating faster than before, and are on track to catch up.
I've interned at Pinterest, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Out of all of them, I chose to return to Pinterest for full-time because I found my fellow employees here were extremely passionate about the product. During my internship, my team gave me all of the "cool" tasks because they wanted me to enjoy my internship. There were also plenty of intern events organized, and housing or stipends offered. I made a lot of long-lasting friends while interning here, and so ultimately chose to sign a return offer and now work full-time. The company is growing now and isn't as small as it was during my internship. At the time there were around 500 employees, but now it has more than doubled.
I had a great time as an intern at Pinterest. On the recruiting side of things, the University Recruiting team put together plenty of cool events, and they did a great job of selecting a diverse group of kind, considerate people. I was on a small team and got to work on two features: one shipped, and one did not. My team made me feel like I was part of the company even though I was only an intern, and I made some great connections over the summer. I'll always look back fondly on my Pinternship. The internship's a lot of work, and there were a few days I was in the office pretty late trying to get code in before branch cut the next day. Other than that, it's a good work/life balance.
Attracts a lot of average product managers and strong designers applying for product-design centric company. However, we have a lot of trouble attracting and keeping seasoned engineers. We also tend to attract micro-managing engineering managers who like to run teams like sweat shops focusing on tactics rather than strategy. Look deeper in the current restructuring. Those who are desperately promoting themselves might be bad apples in the making to further the toxic culture of the departed.
