How a Pinterest engineer is helping others find inspiration

Searching for ideas on how to arrange photos in her college dorm room, Cindy Zhang turned to Pinterest for some inspiration as a freshman.

Now, the 23-year-old software engineer, who joined Pinterest in 2015, is helping 150 million monthly active users on the social bookmarking site tap into their creative side.

Zhang works on the tech firm’s search product team, which consists of 30 percent women engineers. She built the Android version of a new feature the company is testing called Lens, allowing users to discover more ideas by snapping a photo of an object in real life.

“I think as an engineer it’s really important to have inspiration to keep you going and work on a product that you really love,” she said.

Zhang, who is also a singer in Mino the band, sat down with The Mercury News to chat about the company’s visual search efforts. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

How would you describe your job as a software engineer at Pinterest?

I work on the search product team, and we’re responsible for all the user-facing aspects of search. We work on Android, iOS and web. The most recent project I worked on was Pinterest Lens and before that I worked on search recommendations, which are recommendations you get from your search results that kind of pivot you to search for other things.

Pinterest Lens basically allows you to snap a photo and then you get a list of recommended pins. How is the beta testing of the product going so far?

It’s going very well. We’ve got a lot of people posting what photos they’ve snapped on Twitter and recipes they’ve found from Pinterest Lens. We’ve also gotten a lot of people who take selfies of themselves to get their celebrity look-alikes. We discovered that people really like the suggestions we give from Pinterest Lens. If you took a picture of an avocado and got pictures of more avocados, they didn’t find that very helpful. They wanted more context like avocado recipes. We’ve gotten a lot of people really excited about (Lens) on Twitter and social media.

If you’re searching online, normally you would just type it into a search bar instead of taking a photo. How do you change consumer behavior?

I think a lot of Pinners find a lot of ideas when they’re on their computer. We wanted them to get ideas in the real world. I feel like Pinterest is not a search engine where you type in something and you get an answer. It’s more, ‘I’m curious and I don’t know what I’m going to get as results.’ I think Pinterest Lens really helps with that. Here’s a type of furniture I really like, I don’t know what it’s called, but I’m curious about it, so let me take a picture of it and get some ideas.

Sometimes people take photos at a weird angle, or it’s blurry. How is Pinterest tackling that problem?

We have some tools to address it on the front end and the back end. In the app, if you are in a dark setting, we will turn on the auto flash setting for you. Then we also have back-end detection where we will detect whether an image is blurry or dark and then basically show a (notification) telling you we can’t see in the dark or ask you to stay still. We have image detection that will tell you our results aren’t going to be great because you’re moving around too much or your image is too dark.

Do you use Pinterest differently as a musician?

The band I have right now tries to promote ourselves in a way that’s visually appealing. So I use Pinterest a lot for flyer ideas and for cover art album ideas. I feel like most of the music inspiration I get is through listening to music.

Caprice Rosenstengel

has accepted a position as account manager for PQ Systems, with responsibilities