1 Popular internship programs at Pinterest
Pinterest calls its interns “Pinterns,” and its programs are structured to deliver real product impact, close mentorship, and a healthy pipeline into full-time roles. Each summer cohort runs for 12 weeks (fall tracks exist for some teams), offers competitive pay and housing or relocation support, and starts with “Pin Prep” onboarding and a dedicated mentor.
1.1 Software Engineer Pintern Program
A 12-week deep dive into large-scale consumer engineering. Pinterns join a feature team, ship production code, take part in design reviews, and present a capstone demo day. Daily work spans front-end frameworks like React and TypeScript, back-end services in Go or Java, and ML-powered ranking pipelines.
1.2 PhD Machine Learning Internship
Designed for doctoral candidates who want applied research experience. Interns build and evaluate models for visual search, recommendation, and ads relevance, publish findings internally, and collaborate with Pinterest Labs scientists.
1.3 Data Science Internship
Interns own experiments that influence product roadmaps. Projects include designing A/B tests at massive scale, crafting new north-star metrics, and partnering with PMs to translate insights into user-facing features.
1.4 Product Design Internship
A hands-on role inside the Design System and UX teams. Interns craft end-to-end flows, run usability studies, and ship pixel-perfect interfaces that appear in the live app. Figma, prototyping, and accessibility standards are day-to-day tools.
1.5 Product Management Internship
Pintern PMs guide multidisciplinary pods through roadmap definition, sprint planning, and launch analysis. The program emphasizes user research, prioritization frameworks, and data-driven decision making.
1.6 Sales & Partnerships Internship
1.7 Trust & Safety Policy Internship
Interns help draft and test content policies, work with ML teams on abuse-detection signals, and support incident response for trending safety issues—critical experience for anyone eyeing public-policy or content-moderation careers.
1.8 Pinterest Apprenticeship Program
A separate, up-to-one-year pathway for non-traditional or career-switching candidates in engineering, product, research, or design. Apprentices work like full-time employees with the goal of converting to permanent roles after a rigorous milestone review.
2 Popular roles for interns at Pinterest
1. Software Engineer Intern: Software engineering Pinterns join one of Pinterest’s core product teams and ship user-facing features that reach hundreds of millions of monthly active users., They participate fully in code reviews, own test coverage for their components, and deploy behind feature flags so they can analyze real-time impact with internal dashboards. By demo day, most Pinterns can point to at least one feature or performance improvement that has already rolled out to the live app.
2. Machine Learning Intern: ML Pinterns work inside Pinterest Labs or the broader Search & Discovery org, focusing on ranking, recommendation, and computer-vision problems. Day-to-day work includes gathering large-scale training data, experimenting with deep-learning architectures in PyTorch, running offline evaluations, and shipping A/B tests that target click-through-rate lift or session duration.
3. Data Scientist Intern: They design telemetry, build ETL pipelines in Spark or Trino, and define guardrail metrics that guide feature rollouts. Interns create dashboards in Looker, run causal inference studies to separate correlation from impact, and brief leadership on findings that drive quarterly OKRs.
4. Product Designer Intern: Design Pinterns sit with the XD (Experience Design) group and own end-to-end flows from discovery research through high-fidelity mock-ups. They conduct competitive audits, host Figma jam sessions with engineers, and validate usability via unmoderated Maze tests or on-device prototypes. Accessibility, motion guidelines, and design-system token updates are recurring themes.
5. Product Manager Intern: PM Pinterns drive cross-functional pods responsible for launching features such as creator tools, ads formats, or shopping integrations. Responsibilities include crafting PRD documents, aligning stakeholders in sprint kickoff, prioritizing backlog items based on impact versus effort, and setting success metrics.
6. Sales Analyst Intern: Their work spans pulling campaign performance data, building Excel and Looker dashboards, surfacing creative insights that improve ROI, and participating in client pitches. Interns also learn Pinterest’s ad auction dynamics and collaborate with measurement leads to craft test-and-learn plans.
7. Trust and Safety Policy Intern: They collaborate with machine-learning engineers to improve abuse-detection signals and participate in post-incident reviews when high-profile moderation issues arise.
8. Apprenticeship Engineer (Non-traditional Track): The Pinterest Apprenticeship is a longer program, typically lasting nine to twelve months, and is designed for career switchers or boot-camp graduates. Apprentices rotate through two feature teams, follow structured learning plans, and pair with senior engineers to deepen their skills in data structures, system design, and code quality. Progress is measured through milestone projects that match full-time expectations, and successful apprentices convert to engineering roles with clear career ladders.
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