Pinterest is the home where everyone can find inspiration to create the life they love. It strives to be a positive corner of the internet that highlights the freshest, smartest, and most interesting and personalized ideas for any person of any background and ability.
I joined Pinterest in January 2020 and my role is deep behind the scenes. I help improve the experience and design of the tools and services that our 800+ engineers use to do their daily work.
By streamlining and unifying our many disparate tools through a holistic vision and with design systems, engineers can work faster with less cognitive overhead and instead focus on serving up the Pinterest mission to our users.
I’m embedded as the sole designer on the Infrastructure & SRE org on a team called Engineering Productivity, where I collaborate closely with engineers to lead design, run user reviews, and share my process so others can learn and maximize the ROI of design.
My initial focus was on improving deployments for our engineers, a high-touch, high impact area. The tool at hand was our home-grown Hermez, where hundreds deploy and monitor their deployments. It’s also where they begin to debug if anything goes wrong. I met with various engineers to understand their needs and pain points, developed user stories and feature requirements, mocked up designs and prototypes in Figma, and ran reviews on a regular cadence to gather feedback and iterate. As the sole designer without a PM for 11 months, I took on the product responsibilities as well, working with the tech leads on my team to understand the technical implications.
Today I work a little more cross-functionally with PM as the Infra org begins to adopt an EPD (eng/product/design) structure. One key focus is transforming Hermez into the home of CI/CD at Pinterest. This means cutting down some of our surfaces, so less UIs for engineers to context switch between, and one place they can follow their code to production—what they really care about.
I’m also chipping away at strategizing the unification of our tools more broadly along with a small guild of folks across Infra. I’m currently advocating the use of a single design system to foster sharing resources on the front-end (i.e., less duplication) and get the obvious benefit of a similar experience across the board.
At the end of the day I’m here to make our engineers’ lives easier. 🙂
Work samples can be shared if discussing employment. Contact me if you’re interested. Thanks!
