Pinecone
Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Search & Retrieval Infrastructure
New York City · Staff+
Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 79 days ago
JavaGoRustC++Distributed SystemsBackend DevelopmentVector DatabasesKubernetesTerraformData EngineeringLLMsRAG
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odds of building a lasting career here
37Risky
Cap-exempt (no lottery)0
Sponsors this role80
Entry-level history0
PERM / green-card track0
Lottery odds40
Fits your clock70
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About the role
- About Pinecone Pinecone is the trusted AI knowledge company.
- This role is ideal for someone who loves backend system architecture, distributed systems, and applied AI infrastructure.
Responsibilities
- Design and build optimized indexing pipelines for structured and unstructured data
- 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
- you design for high throughput, low latency, and long-term maintainability.
- Data Engineering Savvy: You're comfortable building high-throughput indexing pipelines that handle both the messy world of unstructured data and the rigid world of structured schemas.
- Experience building multi-tenant SaaS platforms.
Requirements
- Infrastructure: Familiarity and experience with modern infrastructure tools, such as Kubernetes, cloud-native architectures, and observability frameworks, as well as infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform or Pulumi.
- 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).
- Architectural Depth: You have a proven track record (typically 6+ years) of shipping production-grade backends for large-scale systems.
- Language Fluency: You are an expert in at least one major language like Go, Rust, C++, Java, or Python.
Skills
- About Pinecone
- Pinecone is the trusted AI knowledge company.
- Pinecone's mission is to make AI knowledgeable.
- For more information, visit pinecone.io http://pinecone.io.
Compensation
- Annual Company Retreat
Benefits
- Comprehensive health coverage including medical, dental, vision, and mental health resources
- Flexible time off
- Paid parental leave
- WFH Equipment Stipend
Company info
- We are hiring a senior/staff software engineer to help design and build core components of our next-generation knowledge retrieval system built for the AI era - search and retrieval infrastructure that powers high-quality, scalable, and enterprise-grade agentic systems.
- You'll build the framework that allows our customers to connect knowledge-synthesized from structured and unstructured data-to modern LLM-powered applications, leveraging the world's best-in-class vector DB supporting semantic search and hybrid retrieval.
- It is a high impact role with significant ownership across architecture, performance, and system reliability.
Visa & Work Authorization
- status, familial status, sexual orientation, pregnancy, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, ancestry, citizenship status, veteran status, and any other legally protected status under federal, state, or l
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