--- title: 'Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Database Team at Pinecone' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-staff-software-engineer-database-team-pinecone-new-york-tgpwgddwyp7k' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-07' --- # Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Database Team at Pinecone - **Company:** Pinecone - **Location:** New York, NY - **Compensation:** $190k–$270k - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** hybrid - **Posted:** 2026-06-15 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-07 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/pinecone/4ef4269b-94c4-4c7c-93ee-15a882caa767 ## Job description ## About Pinecone Pinecone is the trusted AI knowledge company. Its trusted AI knowledge platform—including its Database, Nexus, and Marketplace products—power accurate, fast, and cost-effective AI applications for more than 10,000 customers and 1M developers worldwide. Pinecone's mission is to make AI knowledgeable. For more information, visit pinecone.io http://pinecone.io. 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 ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Pinecone is the knowledge infrastructure for AI at scale, providing the leading vector database and knowledge engine for building accurate, performant AI applications. - **Entity Type**: Private (backed by Andreessen Horowitz, ICONIQ, Menlo Ventures, Wing Venture Capital) - **Headquarters**: New York City, NY, USA (with an additional office in Tel Aviv, Israel) - **Founded**: 2019 - **Founders**: Edo Liberty ## Core Business - **Primary industry/industries**: Vector database / AI infrastructure / Knowledge management - **Target customers**: B2B – developers, engineering teams of all sizes, enterprise customers building AI applications (search, recommendation, agents, RAG) - **Mission or purpose statement**: "Make AI knowledgeable." ## Products & Services - **Pinecone Vector Database**: Fully managed, serverless vector database optimized for low-latency similarity search at billion-scale with automatic scaling, built-in freshness, and a cloud-native architecture. - **Pinecone Nexus**: Knowledge engine that combines cutting-edge models (embedding, planning, reranking) with flexible query mechanisms (vector, keyword, filtering) for end-to-end retrieval. - **Pinecone Assistant**: A conversational interface built on the vector database for question-answering over custom data. - **Pinecone Dedicated Read Nodes**: Isolated read replicas for high-throughput workloads with strict SLAs. - **Pinecone BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud)**: Deployment option that runs within a customer’s own cloud environment for compliance and security requirements. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed. - **Key Metric**: Serves more than **10,000 customers** and **1 million developers** worldwide (source: company page). - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Andreessen Horowitz, ICONIQ, Menlo Ventures, Wing Venture Capital. - **Growth Signals**: Rapidly expanding product suite (Nexus, Assistant, MCP Server), hybrid workforce scaling, continuous hiring in engineering and product roles, and growing adoption among enterprises building AI agents. ## Competitive Advantages - **Proprietary Rust-based implementations** of state-of-the-art algorithms delivering industry-leading performance and low latency. - **Cloud-native architecture** that separates storage from compute and reads from writes, enabling hands-free scaling to billions of vectors and thousands of queries per second. - **Fully managed serverless experience** – no capacity planning or infrastructure tuning needed; built-in freshness for dynamic workloads. - **Best-in-class developer experience** with intuitive APIs, SDKs, extensive documentation, and deep ecosystem integrations (e.g., MCP servers, LangChain, LlamaIndex). - **Cost-effective retrieval** via object-storage-based data tiering and multi-tenant resource packing. ## Strategic Focus - Deepening the "knowledge infrastructure" platform to power the next generation of **AI agents** and intelligent applications. - Advancing retrieval quality with sparse-dense embeddings, reranking, and multimodal capabilities. - Scaling enterprise readiness with BYOC, advanced security features, and compliance certifications. - Expanding developer community and ecosystem integrations to maintain leadership in the vector database category. ## Why Work Here - **Work model**: Hybrid in-office/remote with hubs in New York City and Tel Aviv; remote-friendly roles available for many engineering positions. - **Culture & values**: "Be yourself, Be a friend, Be a pro" – emphasis on authenticity, trust, collaboration, and ownership. - **Team**: Work with world-class scientists and engineers who previously built large-scale ML and distributed systems at AWS, Databricks, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. - **Benefits**: Competitive base salary + equity, flexible PTO, WFH equipment stipend, annual company retreat and team offsites, comprehensive medical/dental/vision, paid parental leave, mental health resources. - **Growth**: Early-stage enough to have outsized impact but with strong product-market fit and massive adoption; opportunity to shape the future of AI infrastructure. ## Sources 1. [pinecone.io - Company](https://www.pinecone.io/company/) 2. [pinecone.io - Careers](https://www.pinecone.io/careers/) 3. [pinecone.io - Product](https://www.pinecone.io/) 4. 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