Invisible Work That Keeps Pinterest Running with Ryan Cooke

In this episode of Beyond the Noise, Matt speaks with Ryan Cooke, Director of Engineering at Pinterest, where his teams own the infrastructure that keeps Pinterest's Android, iOS, and web apps running. Nine years, several promotions, and eight teams later, he joined as an Android engineer and never left.The conversation covers two formative projects: an experiment-driven overhaul of Android image loading that produced outsized engagement gains, and a pre-IPO push to get Pinterest's core metrics accurate enough for public markets: standardizing definitions, building data checkers, and catching silent inflation from sources like Facebook's background auth refresh.Ryan then gets into managing infrastructure at scale: why Pinterest adopted Bazel for iOS builds and walked it back, how AI agents are unlocking migrations that were never worth funding before, and why the same tool produced completely different results in two different engineers' hands. They close on native versus cross-platform: native by default, except where identical behavior across platforms matters more than anything else.