Pinecone

About Pinecone 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. Pinecone's mission is to make AI knowledgeable. 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: The Experience team is at the center of one of the most exciting transitions in software development history — the shift from human-driven to agent-driven product experiences. We own Pinecone's API, clients, authentication, revenue, and observability systems, and right now that means redesigning all of it for a world where AI agents are first-class users alongside humans. This is a wide-scope role. You'll own things end-to-end — from backend architecture to API design to SDK and web surfaces. You’ll be working closely with product, design, and other engineering teams to identify user needs and build the right thing, at the right abstraction level, at the right time. Along the way, you will be building high-leverage platform capabilities that accelerate Pinecone’s product development and user growth systems. We're looking for an engineer who sees this moment for what it is: a rare opportunity to shape how developers and agents interact with a category-defining product. You're not waiting to see how the industry figures out MCP, agentic workflows, and AI-native interfaces — you're already experimenting, already forming opinions, already building. You know that speed and leverage matter more than labor, and you've internalized AI-assisted development not as a productivity trick but as a fundamentally different way of working. Responsibilities: - Pioneer our agent experience. Shape how AI agents interact with Pinecone — designing interfaces, protocols (MCP), and tooling that make Pinecone the easiest and most capable platform for agentic workflows to build on. - Ship end-to-end experiences across API, SDK, CLI, and web. You'll own the full surface, from the HTTP layer to the UI, and you'll make calls across all of it. - Build systems that multiply team output. We care about what ships, not how many hours went into it. Design AI-powered workflows, automated quality gates, and high-leverage platform capabilities that let a small team move at a pace that would otherwise require 10x the headcount. - Set the standard for AI-assisted development on the team. Use the best tools available — Claude Code, Cursor, or whatever works — and help establish patterns that make the whole team faster. - Collaborate with product, design, and engineering to identify what users (and agents) actually need and build it at the right abstraction level, at the right time. - Build observable, auditable systems with monitoring, alerting, and verification mechanisms — because in a high-velocity environment, you need systems that tell you when something's wrong. Requirements: Senior and Staff Engineers at Pinecone operate with high autonomy. You'll be an active partner in setting strategy on APIs, agent interfaces, observability, and developer experience — not just executing on a roadmap. We care more about how you think and how you work than whether your resume checks every box. You should have: - At least 4 years of software engineering experience - A bias toward automation and leverage — you reach for systems and tooling before you reach for elbow grease - Hands-on experience shipping with AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, or similar) as a genuine part of your workflow - Proven ability to design and deliver versioned APIs, SDKs, or client libraries - Proficiency building web interfaces with React or similar - Experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure) - Strong intuition for what makes APIs easy for both humans and agents to use correctly Bonus points for: - Experience building

About Pinecone 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. Pinecone's mission is to make AI knowledgeable. 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: Join a team that builds robust, real-time distributed systems for a cutting-edge database. We care about performance, reliability, scalability, and most of all learning and having fun together. Whether you’re a seasoned coder or just getting started, if you’re passionate about technology and eager to learn, you’ll fit right in. Who we are: - We show up to work, ready to collaborate and build technologies that make a difference, with people who genuinely care. - We chase improvements such as tail latencies, bytes throughput, cache hit rate, and operational cost efficiency. - We believe learning is ongoing and that even the most complex problems can have simple solutions. What You’ll Do: - Collaborate with teammates to design and build database features that power AI applications. - Learn how to tune performance and support reliability in distributed systems (don’t worry, we’ll guide you). - Help Pinecone run smoothly on popular cloud providers. - Take ownership of your work and grow your skills every day. - Have fun. Who You Are: - 5+ years of work experience - programming in Rust, Go, C++, or a comparable language. - You’re genuinely curious about distributed systems and eager to dive deep into technical challenges. - You approach problems with creativity and persistence, and you’re comfortable asking thoughtful questions or seeking feedback. - You’re excited to learn, value constructive feedback, and appreciate mentorship. Bonus Points: - You have hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) or have demonstrated an ability to pick up new tools quickly. - You’re comfortable thinking in async or multi-threaded environments, or can show you’re ready to learn. - You’ve explored performance tools or have a track record of optimizing code for speed, reliability, or efficiency. Perks & Benefits: - Comprehensive health coverage (medical, dental, vision, and mental health resources) - 401(k) plan - Equity award - Flexible time off - Paid parental leave - Annual company retreat - WFH equipment stipend All qualified applicants will receive considerations for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, age, disability, marital status, familial status, sexual orientation, pregnancy, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, ancestry, citizenship status, veteran status, and any other legally protected status under federal, state, or local anti-discrimination laws.

About Pinecone 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. Pinecone's mission is to make AI knowledgeable. 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/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: To thrive in this role, you don't need to check every single box, but you should be deeply passionate about how to turn data into knowledge. 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 multip

About Pinecone 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. Pinecone's mission is to make AI knowledgeable. 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/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: To thrive in this role, you don't need to check every single box, but you should be deeply passionate about how to turn data into knowledge. 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). Perks & Benefits: - Comprehensive health coverage including medical, dental, vision, and mental health resources - 401(k) Plan - Equity award - Flexible time off - Paid parental leave - Annual Company Retreat - WFH Equipment Stipend All qualified applicants will receive considerations for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, age, disability, marital status, familial status, sexual orientation, pregnancy, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, ancestry, citizenship status, veteran status, and any other legally protected status under federal, state, or local anti-discrimination laws.