Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Pinterest Gets an Engineering Leader: Jon Jenkins Joins From Amazon

One of the reasons Pinterest has been an atypical Silicon Valley start-up is that its founders — Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra and Evan Sharp — were not engineers. The company clearly has been able to hire coders to build and extend its visual inspiration-board products, but its technical team developed in an unusual way from the start.

In that context, the company today is announcing that it has hired Jon Jenkins from Amazon to be its head of engineering.

A longtime Amazon guy, Jenkins had most recently led the team that developed the Kindle Fire’s Silk browser. He had also directed platform and developer tools. Prior to that, he had been at Net Perceptions.

A spokesman for Pinterest said that Jenkins “will be responsible for leading the engineering team in its continued development of the Web site, managing and scaling the infrastructure that supports the service, and growing the overall technical team behind Pinterest.”

Jenkins will report to Silbermann, who is now Pinterest’s CEO, and all other tech leads and engineering managers report to him.

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First the NSA came for, well, jeez pretty much everybody’s data at this point, and I said nothing because wait how does this joke work

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