King To Head Engineering For Pinterest

Pinterest just tapped former Walmart CTO Jeremy King as its new head of engineering.

Reporting directly to CEO Ben Silbermann, King will lead a team responsible for powering Pinterest’s visual discovery engine.

At present, the visual search engine delivers recommendations to approximately 250 million consumers across categories like home, food, style and beauty.

Recent Pinterest engineering projects include applying computer vision to automate its Shop the Look service and new shopping features, including Catalogs, shopping ads and personalized shopping recommendations.

Last year, Pinterest was expected to take in $533.3 million in U.S. ad revenues, eMarketer estimated. If accurate, that would have represented a 44% increase, compared to 2017.

King is joining Pinterest at an interesting time. In June, the pin-based network is reportedly planning its public offering at an initial valuation of $12 billion.

“Marketers are seeing Pinterest’s potential for reaching consumers as they’re considering products,” eMarketer senior forecasting director Monica Peart said at the time. “Placing ads is one way they’re inserting their brands into that interaction.”

During his time at Walmart, King led the ecommerce tech team, which encompasses Walmart and Jet.com. Among other responsibilities, he oversaw customer, merchant and supply chain technologies across the retail giant’s cloud and data platforms.

Earlier in his career, King spent time as executive vice president, LiveOps and vice president, engineering at eBay.

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