Pinterest Fires Engineers Who Developed Internal Layoff Tracking System

Pinterest announced it had fired two engineers who built an internal tool to track laid-off employees following a recent round of job cuts at the company. The restructuring, which aims to invest in artificial intelligence (AI), has seen about 4,700 employees reduced to 3,955 as of September 30th.

The firings occurred approximately a week after Pinterest disclosed it was cutting 15% of its staff. During an engineering meeting, the chief security officer emphasized that privacy rights and company policies would prevent any public disclosure of laid-off employee lists. Following this directive, two engineers developed an internal tool to maintain a master list of impacted employees.

The Pinterest spokesperson stated: “After being clearly informed that Pinterest would not broadly share information identifying impacted employees, two engineers wrote custom scripts improperly accessing confidential company data to identify the locations and names of all dismissed employees and then shared it more widely. This was a clear violation of Pinterest policy and privacy policies, as well as the former colleagues’ privacy.”

In a company-wide meeting last week, CEO Tristan Perotta addressed employees by saying, “Healthy debate and dissent are expected, which is how we make our decisions. But there’s a clear line between constructive debate and behavior that’s obstructionist.” He also described Pinterest as facing a critical moment, encouraging employees to consider other employment opportunities if they were working against the company’s direction.

Pinterest joins a list of large companies reducing their workforce by citing AI advancements for reasons related to cost-cutting. In 2025, businesses cited AI in announcing layoffs totaling 55,000 jobs—more than 12 times the number attributed to AI just two years prior, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas.