Channelnextcast

Former Seattleite Jon Jenkins, the Head of Engineering at Pinterest, has taken the lead of a “super scrappy, super agile” team of engineers building one of the biggest social networks on the web today. Using billions -- or maybe even trillions -- of data points supplied by users around the world, he and his team are curating personalized experiences for every Pinner, helping to show them new things they didn’t even know they liked yet. I sat down to talk to Jon about solving some of the most exciting challenges of his career in this edition of Nextcast; here are a few of the highlights: This PolySci graduate with a knack for “hacking around” has done the big company and the startup thing more than once in his career. After spending almost 9 years at Amazon in Seattle, he hightailed it to San Francisco to join the Pinterest startup team, who piqued his interest with an intriguing set of problems to solve. Jenkins says he is “fascinated by challenges associated with scaling things...and challenges associated w