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 .

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.