Pinecone

Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Search & Retrieval Infrastructure

Pinecone
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2 months ago
New York, NY, USASenior / Staff+
H1B sponsor

Base Salary

$190k - $270k/yr

Responsibilities

  • Design and build scalable platform components for query planning, semantic search, hybrid search, metadata-aware search, and LLM generation.
  • Build optimized indexing pipelines for structured and unstructured data.
  • Develop backend services for semantic and hybrid retrieval, knowledge graph construction, and retrieval orchestration.
  • Improve retrieval quality through evaluation and observability frameworks.
  • Design APIs for internal and external users and agentic consumers.
  • Optimize latency, throughput, and cost across large-scale inference and retrieval workloads.
  • Drive technical direction for system reliability and security.

Requirements

  • Typically 6+ years of experience shipping production-grade backend systems at large scale.
  • Proven ability to design high-throughput, low-latency, maintainable distributed systems.
  • Experience building high-throughput indexing pipelines for structured and unstructured data.
  • Direct experience or deep theoretical knowledge of semantic search, vector databases, hybrid retrieval, Elastic, or OpenSearch.
  • Understanding of RAG patterns, embedding pipelines, hybrid search, query planning, and metadata filtering.
  • Expertise in at least one of Go, Rust, C++, Java, or Python.
  • Familiarity with Kubernetes, cloud-native architectures, observability frameworks, and infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform or Pulumi.
  • Ability to design clean APIs for human developers and autonomous agents and take ownership of ambiguous problems.
  • Bonus experience with multi-tenant SaaS platforms, retrieval evaluation frameworks, query planning, or agentic reasoning loops.

Benefits

  • Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, and mental health coverage
  • 401(k) plan
  • Equity award
  • Flexible time off
  • Paid parental leave
  • Annual company retreat
  • Work-from-home equipment stipend
Pinecone

About Pinecone

51-200 employees

Pinecone builds a managed vector database and knowledge engine used by developers and ML teams to power search, retrieval, and other AI application features. It sells a cloud service with APIs and tooling for production-scale similarity search and retrieval-augmented generation. Founded in 2019 and headquartered in New York, the privately held company serves enterprises and startups building generative AI and search experiences.

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