If you’ve been following our recent product launches and posts, you may be curious about how our data infrastructure team functions and how it has grown to support the new products and experiences on Instagram. We operate a very lean team - only 20  engineers supporting Search, Explore, Trending, Account Suggestions, and Data Infrastructure - and have...

Instagram is in the fortunate position to be a small company within the infrastructure of a much larger one. When it makes sense, we leverage resources to leapfrog into experiences that have taken Facebook ten years to build. Facebook’s search infrastructure, Unicorn, is a social-graph-aware search engine that has scaled to indexes containing trillions...

With last week’s Search and Explore launch, we introduced the ability to easily find interesting moments on Instagram as they happen in the world. The trending hashtags and places you see in Explore surface some of the best, most popular content from across the community, and pull from places and accounts you might not have seen otherwise. Building...

Over the past few months, we’ve built two high-performing recommendation services that handle tens of thousands of queries per second and generate tens of millions connections per day. In this blog post, we want to share our experience of scaling these two services using Futures and, most importantly, how we fine-tuned the details. The first recommendation...

Today’s post is a continuation of Part 1 on emoji semantics. 🙀🔝Last week, Instagram began supporting emoji characters inside of hashtags. On Friday we talked about the rise in emoji usage on Instagram and how to discover the semantics of text. Today’s post will focus on the engineering details of implementing emoji hashtags — a seemingly simple regular...

🆒🆕In October 2011, Apple added the emoji keyboard to iOS as an international keyboard. Since then, digital language has evolved such that nearly half of comments and captions on Instagram contain emoji characters. And earlier this week, Instagram also added support for emoji characters in hashtags, which allows people to tag and search content with...