Meet Kinnary Jangla, a senior software engineer at Pinterest. Kinnary works on the homefeed team where she works on machine learning infrastructure as a backend engineer. She is also committed to helping Pinterest hire and retain more women, which Kinnary does through her involvement with Pinterest’s Diversity and Inclusion team. We interviewed Kinnary as part of AI4ALL’s Role Models in AI series, where we feature the perspectives of people working in AI.
As told to Nicole Halmi of AI4ALL by Kinnary Jangla
NH: Can you describe what you do as a senior software engineer at Pinterest? What does a typical day look like for you? What kind of projects do you work on?
KJ: As a senior software engineer at Pinterest, I own projects, and I’m also expected to be aware of all of the projects that the rest of the team owns. Some of these projects require cross-team collaboration — I might be collaborating with people from product, design, sales, marketing, or data analysts, for example.
On a typical day, I’d like to spend 50% of the day coding. I spend much of the rest of my time in meetings that facilitate cross-team collaboration. In addition to that work, I have committed to helping Pinterest increase their diversity numbers by helping bring more women engineers to our workforce. Around 20% of my time in a week goes towards work like brainstorming with our head of Diversity and Inclusion, working out budget, coming up with initiatives, and helping the recruiter figure out how to run events that will most effectively target women we’re trying to hire.
I feel very passionately about my community of women in tech. There are certain issues that women face that I can relate to because I’ve been through it.
For those reasons, I feel the need to help that community. So that’s also part of my job here at Pinterest.
How did you decide to get a bachelor’s and master’s degree in CS? Were you interested in the field at a young age or did you discover it in college? And how did you come to work on a machine learning team at Pinterest?
At a young age, I had no idea I wanted to do computer science. I always wanted to be a doctor, because everybody in my family is a doctor — my sister is a doctor, my dad is a doctor, my brother-in-law is a doctor. However, in high school, I ended up doing really well in physics. My dad was a great mentor to me, and he noticed that I was really good in physics and math, more than I was good in biology. He kind of turned my thoughts from medicine to engineering by encouraging me to explore the engineering field. The more he encouraged me, the more I got encouraged. In the beginning, I wanted to do nuclear physics, but my father thought that computer science was going to be the future, so he had me talk to people in the computer science field, which I found inspiring. That’s how I ended up doing my bachelor’s degree in computer engineering. When I finished that, it was my father who turned my thoughts towards getting a master’s degree here in the United States. I started thinking about it, got interested in it, and here I am.
My work at Pinterest has been driven by my curiosity in a sense. When I explored Pinterest in 2016, it was very interesting to me in that Pinterest kept recommending to me what I might like. The recommendations are pretty powerful — they made me wonder if Pinterest knew me better than I knew myself! That piqued my interest in understanding how recommendations are built on Pinterest. As a result, I started thinking about machine learning. Though I am not a machine learning engineer, I work on machine learning infrastructure, which requires that you have some knowledge of how ML and recommendations work, and how you take user action into consideration.
Where do you see AI making the biggest impact in the next 5 years? What are some of the important things people should be doing to create a positive future for AI?
Self-driving cars are definitely going to change how people commute — hopefully resulting in fewer accidents, tighter traffic rules. Other than that, I think there’s a huge potential in the image and speech recognition space. It’s already great, but I think there’s a potential for a higher accuracy there. I think AI has a number of important applications in the medical science field as well.
In terms of how to create a positive future for AI: I think we need to act with a bit of trepidation and make sure people understand what is being done with their privacy and their data. How do we protect ourselves? How do we create a safer world? I think the initiative OpenAI, which is aimed at creating safer artificial intelligence, is doing good work in that space. It’s also crucial to create transparency and awareness amongst users of this technology. Allowing algorithms to be opaque and to stay concentrated in the hands of a certain population could be dangerous.
Who were your role models growing up? Do you have any role models now?
My dad has always been very influential in my life. He’s very emotionally intelligent, very perceptive, and he’s been a great guide and a great mentor. Other than him, Oprah Winfrey was one of my biggest role models growing up. She’s a humanist who is extremely emotionally intelligent, relatable, and has amazing leadership qualities. Her confidence and her fierceness just comes through in her body language, which was very inspiring to me growing up. Whenever I saw her, I felt that I could do anything I wanted to do.
Today, I really look up to how Elon Musk thinks. He can envision the future and take (sometimes quite ambitious) action today to make sure that future is safe.
What has been the proudest or most exciting moment in your work so far?
Before I was at Pinterest, I worked at Uber. At Uber, I worked on the international growth team where I was helping signups become a lot easier for people in Asia. In working there, I heard a lot of drivers say that Uber helped them pay their rent. Working on a product that helps people send their children to school, helps people bring home food at the end of the day home, or helps them pay their medical bills was extremely rewarding. Every time I shipped anything there, I felt very proud.
What advice do you have for young people who are interested in engineering or machine learning who might just be starting their career journeys?
This is my favorite topic. My advice is to just go for it! And while you’re there, think safely. Not just for yourself, but for the world, because we owe it to the world to keep AI safe.
Also, if you’re a woman who is thinking of getting into engineering or ML, don’t be intimidated and don’t let anyone intimidate you. It’s not anybody’s place to do that. Believe in yourself. Nothing in the computer science world is too hard — anything and everything can be figured out. You just need to put your mind to it and you’re golden.
About Kinnary
Kinnary Jangla is a senior software engineer in the homefeed team at Pinterest. She works on the machine learning infrastructure team as a backend engineer. Kinnary has worked in the industry for 10+ years. She comes most recently from Uber where she worked on Maps and International growth and Microsoft before that where she worked on Bing search. She holds a MS in computer science from University of Illinois and BE from University of Mumbai.
Catch Kinnary at upcoming conferences Strata San Jose and Strata London, and check out her books on Amazon.
Follow along with AI4ALL’s Role Models in AI series on Twitter and Facebook at #rolemodelsinAI. We’ll be publishing a new interview with an AI expert on Wednesdays this winter. The experts we feature are working in AI in a variety of roles and have taken a variety of paths to get there. They bring to life the importance of including a diversity of voices in the development and use of AI.