Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Search & Retrieval Infrastructure

Stack

Responsibilities

• ▹Design and build scalable platform components leveraging query planning, semantic and hybrid search
• ▹Design and build optimized indexing pipelines for structured and unstructured data
• ▹Build backend services for semantic/hybrid retrieval and knowledge graph construction
• ▹Improve retrieval quality through evaluation and observability frameworks
• ▹Design APIs for internal, external and agentic consumers
• ▹Optimize latency, throughput and cost across large-scale inference and retrieval workloads

Requirements

• ▹6+ years shipping production-grade backends for large-scale systems
• ▹Comfortable building high-throughput indexing pipelines for structured and unstructured data
• ▹Direct or deep theoretical knowledge of semantic search, vector databases, hybrid retrieval (e.g., Elastic, OpenSearch)
• ▹Understanding of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) patterns: embedding pipelines, hybrid search, query planning
• ▹Expert in at least one major language (Go, Rust, C++, Java or Python)
• ▹Familiarity with modern infrastructure: Kubernetes, cloud-native architectures, Terraform or Pulumi

Nice to have

• ▹Experience building multi-tenant SaaS platforms
• ▹Experience with retrieval evaluation frameworks
• ▹Experience with query planning or agentic reasoning loops

Soft skills

What we offer

• ▹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

About the company

Pinecone is the knowledge infrastructure for AI at scale; its leading vector database, Pinecone Nexus, powers accurate, performant AI applications for 9,000+ customers and 800,000+ developers, based in New York with significant VC backing.