Description
Behind every fast vector query is a distributed system making decisions about storage, caching, concurrency, networking, reliability, and resource utilization.
Pinecone's Database Team works on that underlying engine.
This Senior/Staff Software Engineer will build database capabilities used by AI applications at scale. Rather than focusing on prompt engineering or model training, the work centers on the systems that make semantic search and vector retrieval dependable enough for production workloads.
Performance is a continuous concern. Engineers investigate tail latency, throughput, cache effectiveness, operational cost, asynchronous execution, and other low-level characteristics that become important when large numbers of applications depend on the database simultaneously.
A strong candidate is likely to have several years of systems or backend engineering experience and proficiency in languages such as Rust, Go, C++, or comparable compiled systems languages. Experience with distributed systems, concurrency, multi-threaded software, cloud infrastructure, storage systems, or database internals can transfer directly to the team's problems.
The role is also closely connected to AI infrastructure even though the day-to-day work is database engineering. Pinecone's database forms the retrieval foundation used by semantic search, RAG, knowledge systems, and agentic applications, so improvements at this layer can affect the accuracy, latency, and economics of higher-level AI products.
This position is currently listed for New York City and involves substantial ownership of production infrastructure rather than narrowly scoped feature work.
Curated opportunity. Please verify details and apply via the original link below. No Signals are required for this project/job.
https://www.pinecone.io/careers/4ef4269b-94c4-4c7c-93ee-15a882caa767/