Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Search & Retrieval Infrastructure

Pinecone

Senior/staff engineer building scalable search and retrieval infrastructure for Pinecone’s AI vector database. Designing indexing pipelines, retrieval services, APIs, and reliability systems for LLM-powered applications.

Posted 8/5/2026full-timeNew York City • New York • 🇺🇸 United StatesSenior💰 $190,000 - $270,000 per yearWebsite

Core Competencies

Role fit

Core Competencies

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Demonstrates expertise in designing and building scalable backend services and indexing pipelines for both structured and unstructured data, with a strong focus on semantic search and retrieval optimization. Proficient in API design and capable of driving technical direction for reliability and security in high-throughput environments.

Highest-signal resume keywords

Semantic SearchHigh-Throughput Indexing PipelinesAPI DesignKubernetesGo

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills

Backend DevelopmentIndexing PipelinesRetrieval-Augmented GenerationQuery PlanningHybrid RetrievalVector DatabasesObservability FrameworksInfrastructure-as-CodeProduction-Grade SystemsMulti-Tenant SaaS Platforms

Soft Skills

Problem OwnershipCollaboration

Tools & Technologies

ElasticOpenSearchTerraformPulumiCloud-Native Architectures

Industry Keywords

Large-Scale SystemsRetrieval QualityMetadata FilteringEmbedding PipelinesAutonomous Agents

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

CloudGoJavaKubernetesPythonRustTerraform

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

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

Requirements

What you’ll need

Typically 6+ years shipping production-grade backends for large-scale systems
Proven ability to design for high throughput, low latency, and long-term maintainability
Experience building high-throughput indexing pipelines for unstructured data and structured schemas
Direct experience or deep theoretical knowledge in semantic search, vector databases, hybrid retrieval strategies, or traditional search engines such as Elastic or OpenSearch
Understanding of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) patterns, embedding pipelines, hybrid search, query planning, and metadata filtering
Expert in at least one major language such as Go, Rust, C++, Java, or Python
Familiarity and experience with Kubernetes, cloud-native architectures, observability frameworks, and infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform or Pulumi
Ability to design clean, intuitive APIs for human developers and autonomous agents
Comfortable owning problems in a high-growth environment
Experience building multi-tenant SaaS platforms (bonus)
Experience with retrieval evaluation frameworks (bonus)
Experience with query planning or agentic reasoning loops (bonus)

Benefits

Comp & perks

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