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 backend system architecture and applied 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
• Design for high throughput, low latency, and long-term maintainability
• Comfortable building high-throughput indexing pipelines that handle both unstructured data and structured schemas
• Direct experience (or deep theoretical knowledge) in semantic search, vector databases, hybrid retrieval strategies, or traditional search engines like Elastic or OpenSearch
• Understanding of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) patterns, embedding pipelines, hybrid search techniques, query planning, and metadata filtering
• 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
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform or Pulumi
• Ability to design clean, intuitive APIs for both human developers and autonomous agents
• 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)