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Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Search & Retrieval Infrastructure

Pinecone· R&D
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Remote$190k - $270kFull-timePosted 3mo ago

About the role

Senior/Staff software engineer to design and build core components of Pinecone's next-generation knowledge retrieval system, focusing on scalable search, retrieval infrastructure, and integration with LLM-powered 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

Qualifications

  • Architectural Depth: 6+ years shipping production-grade backends for large-scale systems
  • Data Engineering Savvy: experience building high-throughput indexing pipelines for unstructured and structured data
  • Retrieval Intuition: experience or deep theoretical knowledge in semantic search, vector databases, hybrid retrieval, or traditional search engines (Elastic, OpenSearch)
  • RAG & Orchestration: understanding of Retrieval-Augmented Generation patterns, embedding pipelines, hybrid search, and query planning with metadata filtering
  • Language Fluency: expert in Go, Rust, C++, Java, or Python
  • Infrastructure: familiarity with Kubernetes, cloud-native architectures, observability, and IaC tools (Terraform, Pulumi)
  • Ownership & Impact: ability to design APIs, own problems, and operate in high-growth environments

Skills

Required:System design and backend architectureData engineering for indexing pipelinesSemantic and hybrid search
Nice to have:RAG and orchestration concepts

Benefits

  • Comprehensive health coverage (medical, dental, vision, mental health)
  • 401(k) Plan
  • Equity award
  • Flexible time off
  • Paid parental leave
  • Annual company retreat
  • WFH equipment stipend
Last updated Sep 6, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Pinecone

The vector database to build knowledgeable AI | Pinecone

Pinecone is a fully managed vector database built for AI. Writes are instantly searchable, indexing is automatic, and queries stay fast at any scale.

Vector DatabaseAssistantRAG pipelineCLIMCPCodexGeminiClaude Code
Company profileWebsite

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