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Pinecone is hiring a Senior/Staff Software Engineer to design and build core components of its next-generation knowledge retrieval system. This role focuses on search and retrieval infrastructure that powers scalable, enterprise-grade agentic systems leveraging vector databases and semantic search.
Key Responsibilities:
- Design and build scalable platform components for advanced retrieval, including query planning, semantic and hybrid search, and metadata-aware search
- Develop optimized indexing pipelines for structured and unstructured data
- Build backend services for semantic/hybrid retrieval, knowledge graph construction, and retrieval orchestration
- Improve retrieval quality through evaluation and observability frameworks
- Design APIs for internal, external, and agentic consumers
- Optimize latency, throughput, and cost across large-scale inference and retrieval workloads
- Drive technical direction for reliability and security
Required Experience:
- 6+ years shipping production-grade backends for large-scale systems with focus on high throughput, low latency, and maintainability
- Deep expertise in data engineering, comfortable with high-throughput indexing pipelines handling both unstructured and structured data
- Direct experience or deep theoretical knowledge in semantic search, vector databases, hybrid retrieval, or traditional search engines (Elasticsearch, OpenSearch)
- Understanding of RAG patterns, embedding pipelines, hybrid search techniques, and query planning
- Expert-level proficiency in Go, Rust, C++, Java, or Python
- Familiarity with modern infrastructure (Kubernetes, cloud-native architectures, observability frameworks, Terraform/Pulumi)
- Product-oriented mindset with ability to design clean APIs for developers and autonomous agents
- Comfort navigating ambiguity in high-growth environments
Bonus qualifications include multi-tenant SaaS platform experience, retrieval evaluation framework expertise, and experience with query planning or agentic reasoning loops.
Pinecone is a well-funded ($138M) AI infrastructure company based in New York, serving 9,000+ customers and 800,000 developers with its vector database and knowledge engine.
About Pinecone
AI / Data / Infrastructure — vector database infrastructure for AI applications and semantic search.
