Jon Jenkins joined Pinterest from Amazon in 2012.
Jenkins arrived as Pinterest was rapidly expanding beyond its small startup roots. He was hired as an engineering leader, bringing experience from Amazon to a company whose visual bookmarking service was beginning to attract a much larger audience. Contemporary reports specifically described his background as including work connected with Amazon’s Kindle Fire.
His recruitment reflected Pinterest’s need to strengthen its engineering organization. The service had to support fast growth in users, images, boards, search, recommendations, and site reliability. Bringing in senior technical leadership from a major internet retailer also fit Pinterest’s interest in improving discovery and commerce-related features.
A common mix-up is to associate Jenkins with Facebook or Google because Pinterest recruited many engineers from prominent technology companies during this period. The reported 2012 move, however, was from Amazon. Jenkins’s arrival was part of Pinterest’s broader effort to build an experienced leadership team while the company was still defining its long-term product and business model.