Senior Software Engineer, Knowledge Engine

Pinecone is the leading vector database for building accurate and performant AI applications at scale in production. They are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to design and build core components of their next-generation knowledge retrieval system, focusing on scalable and high-quality AI infrastructure.

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

Requirements:

• Proven track record (typically 6+ years) of shipping production-grade backends for large-scale systems
• Comfortable building high-throughput indexing pipelines that handle both the messy world of unstructured data and the rigid world of structured schemas
• Direct experience (or deep theoretical knowledge) in semantic search, vector databases, hybrid retrieval strategies, or with traditional search engines like Elastic or OpenSearch
• Understanding of 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
• Expert in at least one major language like Go, Rust, C++, Java, or Python
• 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
• Ability to design clean, intuitive APIs that both human developers and autonomous agents will love
• Comfortable in a high-growth environment and prefer 'owning a problem' over 'executing a ticket.'
• 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 specific steps)