Senior Software Engineer, Knowledge Engine

About this role

About Pinecone
Pinecone is the leading vector database for building accurate and performant AI applications at scale in production. Pinecone's mission is to make AI knowledgeable. More than 9000 customers across various industries have shipped AI applications faster and more confidently with Pinecone's developer-friendly technology. Pinecone is based in New York and raised $138M in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, ICONIQ, Menlo Ventures, and Wing Venture Capital.


About The Team And Role
We are hiring a senior software engineer to help design and build core components of our next-generation knowledge retrieval system built for the AI era – knowledge 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
To thrive in this role,...