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Pinecone

Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Search & Retrieval Infrastructure

Department
Engineering
Job Type / Location
Us Remote
Experience Required
6+ years
Posted On

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:

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.
  • RAG & Orchestration: You understand 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.

Technical

  • Language Fluency: You are an expert in at least one major language like Go, Rust, C++, Java, or Python.
  • Infrastructure: 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.

Ownership & Impact

  • Product Thinking: You don't just build to spec; you build for the user. You can design clean, intuitive APIs that both human developers and autonomous agents will love.
  • Ambiguity Navigator: You’re comfortable in a high-growth environment. You prefer "owning a problem" over "executing a ticket."

Bonus Points

  • 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).

View Assessment Process

Think you'll be a good fit?