Senior Software Engineer, AI Search Team

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 5000 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:

The AI Search team builds the core services and infrastructure for large-scale data ingestion and retrieval in support of agentic applications. We develop the models, tools, and systems that power high-quality search over complex data with contextual grounding—enabling our customers to build the next generation of intelligent applications.

We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer with strong backend or full stack engineering experience to help scale and evolve our ingestion and retrieval stack. You’ll own critical services and infrastructure, collaborate across teams, and contribute to delivering highly performant, reliable systems in production, primarily written in Rust (Rust experience not required, just a willingness to learn).

Responsibilities:

• Design and build scalable infrastructure for data ingestion, processing, indexing and retrieval

• Develop distributed services and APIs that power low-latency, high-throughput systems

• Define and uphold engineering standards, ensuring high performance, security, and maintainability

• Mentor team members and support a collaborative engineering culture

• Contribute to reliability through testing, observability, and operational excellence

• Contribute to engineering culture by shaping internal standards, tools, and best practices around distributed system design, code quality, and performance tuning

• Collaborate across functions including working with product, design, and infrastructure teams to align technical direction with product needs and user experience

Requirements:

• 5+ years of experience building reliable, scalable systems from design to deployment and ongoing support

• Strong software engineering fundamentals, with a focus on building production-grade systems that are maintainable and performant

• Strong programming skills, with deep knowledge of at least one core language and working familiarity with others—preferably including a lower-level or systems languages like Go, Rust, or C++

• Proven ability to work across the stack, including web and backend services, APIs, databases, and data pipelines

• Effective communicator with the ability to collaborate in a team setting across engineering, design, and product functions

Bonus (Nice to Have):

• Experience with ML systems, vector databases, or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)

• Experience with Rust, or interest in learning it

• Experience with cloud-native infrastructure, container orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes), and CI/CD pipelines is a plus.

• Background in full-stack development

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

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging (DEIB) are the cornerstone of everything we do at Pinecone. Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply for jobs unless they believe they meet every one of the qualifications in a job description. Our top priority is finding the best candidate for the job and if you are interested in the position, we would encourage you to apply, even if you don’t believe you meet every one of the qualifications listed in this posting. 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.