The opportunity
Pinecone is the knowledge infrastructure for AI at scale. Its leading vector database and knowledge engine, Pinecone Nexus, power accurate, performant AI applications for more than 9,000 customers and 800,000 developers worldwide.
What you'll do
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
What they're looking for
- Drive technical direction for reliability and security
- 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.
- 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.
