About the job
About Pinecone
Pinecone stands as the premier vector database designed for the development of precise and high-performance AI applications on a large scale. Our mission is to empower AI with knowledge. We have over 9,000 customers from diverse industries who have successfully deployed AI applications more swiftly and confidently using our developer-centric technology. Based in New York, Pinecone has secured $138 million in funding from esteemed investors including Andreessen Horowitz, ICONIQ, Menlo Ventures, and Wing Venture Capital.
About the Team and Role:
We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to contribute to the design and development of essential components for our state-of-the-art knowledge retrieval system tailored for the AI era. This knowledge infrastructure will facilitate high-quality, scalable, and enterprise-level agentic systems. You will develop the framework enabling our clients to integrate knowledge, derived from both structured and unstructured data, into contemporary LLM-powered applications while utilizing the leading vector database that supports semantic search and hybrid retrieval. This position is ideal for individuals passionate about backend system architecture, distributed systems, and applied AI infrastructure. You will have a significant impact with substantial ownership over architecture, performance, and system reliability.
Key Responsibilities:
- Design and develop scalable platform components that utilize advanced retrieval techniques, including query planning, semantic and hybrid search, metadata-aware search, and LLM generation.
- Create optimized indexing pipelines for both structured and unstructured data.
- Develop backend services for semantic and hybrid retrieval, knowledge graph creation, and retrieval orchestration.
- Enhance retrieval quality through the implementation of evaluation and observability frameworks.
- Design APIs for both internal and external users and agentic consumers.
- Optimize latency, throughput, and cost across extensive inference and retrieval workloads.
- Lead the technical direction for system reliability and security.
Your Qualifications:
To excel in this role, a deep passion for transforming data into knowledge is essential, although complete compliance with all requirements is not mandatory.
Systems Expertise:
- Architectural Depth: Demonstrated success (typically 6+ years) in delivering production-grade backends for large-scale systems. You possess a profound understanding of backend architecture and distributed systems.
