Pinterest fires two engineers for building layoff-tracking tool

Recent layoffs and an AI-focused hiring push has rattled employees at the tech company.

Pinterest dismissed two US-based engineers after a software tool they built to track recent layoffs was found to violate a company privacy policy.

Last week, Pinterest announced it would cut 15% of its workforce and reduce office space as part of a restructuring, reallocating resources to AI-focused roles and products, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

CEO Bill Ready told staff he was “doubling down on an AI-forward approach”, according to a LinkedIn post by a designer who lost their job in the recent layoffs.

After the announcement, Pinterest CTO Matt Madrigal hosted a meeting where Chief Security Officer Andy Steingruebl told engineers that a list of laid-off employees would not be shared to protect their privacy, in line with company policy, according to Fortune. 

Two engineers at the company then built a script to identify laid-off employees and shared the results.

“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,” a Pinterest spokesperson told Fortune. “This was a clear violation of Pinterest policy and of their former colleagues’ privacy.”

Ready also advised employees they should consider leaving if they are “working against the direction of the company,” according to a CNBC report.

Pinterest did not respond to a LeadDev request for comment.

AI reducing headcounts 

Pinterest is just the latest technology company to link AI to layoffs. 

In 2025, companies explicitly cited AI when announcing 55,000 job cuts – more than 12 times the number linked to AI just two years earlier – according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas. 

Of those cuts, 51,000 were in tech – with most concentrated in tech-heavy states such as California and Washington.

For example, Klarna cut 40% of its workforce between late 2022 and 2023, a shift CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski largely attributed to AI investments.

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