Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Pinecone is the leading vector database for building accurate and performant AI applications at scale in production. They are seeking a Senior/Staff Software Engineer to design and build core components of their next-generation knowledge retrieval system, focusing on scalable search and retrieval infrastructure for AI applications.
Responsibilities
- Design and build scalable platform components leveraging advanced retrieval via query planning, semantic and hybrid search, metadata-aware search, and LLM generation
- Design and build optimized indexing pipelines for structured and unstructured data
- Build 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 user and agentic consumers
- Optimize latency, throughput and cost across large-scale inference and retrieval workloads
- Drive technical direction for reliability and security
Skills
- Proven track record (typically 6+ years) of shipping production-grade backends for large-scale systems
- Design for high throughput, low latency, and long-term maintainability
- Comfortable building high-throughput indexing pipelines that handle both unstructured data and structured schemas
- Direct experience (or deep theoretical knowledge) in semantic search, vector databases, hybrid retrieval strategies, or traditional search engines like Elastic or OpenSearch
- Understanding of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) patterns, embedding pipelines, hybrid search techniques, query planning, and metadata filtering
- Expert in at least one major language like Go, Rust, C++, Java, or Python
- Familiarity and experience with modern infrastructure tools, such as Kubernetes, cloud-native architectures, and observability frameworks
- Experience with infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform or Pulumi
- Ability to design clean, intuitive APIs for both human developers and autonomous agents
- Comfortable in a high-growth environment and prefer 'owning a problem' over 'executing a ticket.'
- Experience building multi-tenant SaaS platforms
- Experience with retrieval evaluation frameworks—knowing how to actually measure 'good' search results
- Experience with query planning or agentic reasoning loops (e.g., teaching a system how to break down a complex prompt into multiple specific steps)
Benefits
- Comprehensive health coverage including medical, dental, vision, and mental health resources
- 401(k) Plan
- Equity award
- Flexible time off
- Paid parental leave
- Annual Company Retreat
- WFH Equipment Stipend
Company Overview
Pinecone develops a vector database that makes it easy to connect company data with generative AI models. It was founded in 2019, and is headquartered in New York, New York, USA, with a workforce of 51-200 employees. Its website is https://www.pinecone.io.Company H1B Sponsorship
Pinecone has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships, with 3 in 2025, 4 in 2024, 5 in 2023, 1 in 2021. Please note that this does not guarantee sponsorship for this specific role.