Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Search & Retrieval Infrastructure

About Pinecone

Pinecone is the trusted AI knowledge company. Its trusted AI knowledge platform—including its Database, Nexus, and Marketplace products—power accurate, fast, and cost-effective AI applications for more than 10,000 customers and 1M developers worldwide. Pinecone's mission is to make AI knowledgeable. For more information, visit pinecone.io http://pinecone.io.

About the Team and Role:

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. This role is ideal for someone who loves backend system architecture, distributed systems, and applied AI infrastructure. It is a high impact role with significant ownership across architecture, performance, and system reliability.

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

What You’ll Bring to the Table:

To thrive in this role, you don't need to check every single box, but you should be deeply passionate about how to turn data into knowledge.

Systems Expertise

- Architectural Depth: You have a proven track record (typically 6+ years) of shipping production-grade backends for large-scale systems. You don’t just write code; 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.

AI & Retrieval

- Retrieval Intuition: You understand that "search" is more than just a keyword match. You have direct experience (or deep theoretical knowledge) in semantic search, vector databases, hybrid retrieval strategies, or with traditional search engines like Elastic or OpenSearch.

- RAG & Orchestration: You understand the nuances of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) patterns, from embedding pipelines and hybrid search techniques to how query planning and metadata filtering can make or break an LLM's performance.

Technical

- Language Fluency: You are an expert in at least one major language like Go, Rust, C++, Java, or Python.

- 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.

Ownership & Impact

- Product Thinking: You don't just build to spec; you build for the user. You can design clean, intuitive APIs that both human developers and autonomous agents will love.

- Ambiguity Navigator: You’re comfortable in a high-growth environment. You prefer "owning a problem" over "executing a ticket."

Bonus Points

- 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…