Pinterest fired 2 engineers who built an internal layoff tracker

Pinterest said it fired two engineers who built an internal tool to track which employees had been laid off following a recent round of job cuts at the social media company.

The firings come about a week after the lifestyle app said it was cutting 15% of its staff as it invests in artificial intelligence. Pinterest, which had about 4,700 employees prior to the layoffs, said the restructuring should be complete by Sept. 30.

Pinterest’s chief security officer had told engineering employees in a meeting that it wouldn’t disclose a list of laid-off employees due to those individuals’ privacy rights and the company’s privacy policies, according to a source with the company. After that meeting, two engineers built an internal tool to create a master list of employees who were impacted by the job cuts, the person said. 

Privacy violation

The engineers who wrote the scripts were fired, a Pinterest spokesperson told CBS News. 

“After being clearly informed that Pinterest would not broadly share information identifying impacted employees, two engineers wrote custom scripts improperly accessing confidential company information to identify the locations and names of all dismissed employees and then shared it more broadly,” the spokesperson said. 

She added, “This was a clear violation of Pinterest policy and of their former colleagues’ privacy.”

“Obstructionist” behavior?

At a companywide meeting last week, according to CNBC, Ready told workers, “Healthy debate and dissent are expected, that’s how we make our decisions. But there’s a clear line between constructive debate and behavior that’s obstructionist.”

Ready also described Pinterest as facing a “critical moment,” and told employees they should consider working elsewhere if they are “working against the direction of the company,” CNBC reported.

Pinterest is the latest in a number of large businesses to cite AI in reducing headcount. Companies in 2025 directly pointed to their use of AI in announcing 55,000 job cuts — more than 12 times the number of layoffs attributed to AI just two years earlier, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas.