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Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Search & Retrieval Infrastructure

Pinecone· R&D
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Hybrid (New York City)$190k - $270kFull-timePosted 2mo ago

About the role

Senior/staff software engineer to design and build core components of Pinecone's knowledge retrieval system, focusing on search and retrieval infrastructure, semantic/hybrid search, and scalable backend platforms for AI-enabled 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: proven track record (typically 6+ years) of shipping production-grade backends for large-scale systems; design for high throughput, low latency, and maintainability
  • Data Engineering Savvy: experience building high-throughput indexing pipelines for unstructured and structured data
  • Retrieval Intuition: experience or deep knowledge in semantic search, vector databases, hybrid retrieval strategies, or traditional search engines (Elastic/OpenSearch)
  • RAG & Orchestration: understanding of Retrieval-Augmented Generation patterns, embedding pipelines, hybrid search, query planning and metadata filtering for LLM performance
  • Language Fluency: expert in Go, Rust, C++, Java, or Python
  • Infrastructure: experience with Kubernetes, cloud-native architectures, observability frameworks, and IaC tools (Terraform, Pulumi)
  • Product Thinking: ability to design clean APIs for humans and autonomous agents
  • Ambiguity Navigator: comfortable in high-growth environments and owning problems

Skills

Required:Architectural design and system thinkingData engineering and indexingSemantic/hybrid searchProgramming languages
Nice to have:RAG and orchestration

Benefits

  • Comprehensive health coverage including medical, dental, vision, and mental health resources
  • 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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