Pinecone is seeking a hands-on Applied AI Engineer to design, build, and ship end-to-end LLM-powered full-stack applications using retrieval and knowledge infrastructure. This role spans backend services, APIs, retrieval pipelines, and user-facing experiences, with a focus on quality, reliability, latency, and cost.
What You Will Do
- Design, build, and ship end-to-end AI applications using Pinecone’s retrieval and knowledge infrastructure.
- Develop full-stack solutions across frontend interfaces, backend services, APIs, data pipelines, and LLM integration.
- Build reference applications, integrations, and reusable components to support developer and customer adoption of Pinecone.
- Experiment with emerging AI patterns such as RAG, agents, tool use, context engineering, and agent memory.
- Partner with customers, partners, and internal teams to understand real-world problems and convert them into working software.
- Evaluate and improve AI application quality, reliability, latency, and cost.
- Share technical insights and best practices through code, examples, and technical content.
- Feed learnings from application development back into Pinecone product and engineering teams.
Required Qualifications
- Strong software engineering background with experience designing, building, and shipping production applications.
- Proficiency in Python and/or TypeScript, including modern backend frameworks and frontend technologies such as React or Next.js.
- Experience building APIs, integrating external services, and working with databases and cloud infrastructure.
- Ability to take a project from rough requirements through implementation and deployment independently.
- Hands-on experience building applications using LLMs, embeddings, vector databases, or retrieval-augmented generation.
- Familiarity with modern AI development tools, frameworks, and APIs.
- Understanding of practical AI application challenges, including retrieval quality, evaluation, latency, reliability, and cost.
- Curiosity about emerging agentic patterns, context management, and AI-driven workflows.
- A builder’s mindset with enjoyment of writing code, experimenting, and delivering working software to users.
- Comfort working with ambiguous requirements and making pragmatic technical decisions.
- Ability to communicate technical ideas clearly to engineers, customers, and other stakeholders.
- Comfort moving between rapid prototypes and production-quality implementations.
- Interest in understanding how developers and customers use the technology and translating feedback into improved solutions.
Technologies
Pinecone, Python, TypeScript, React, Next.js, LLMs, embeddings, vector databases, retrieval-augmented generation, RAG, agents, tool use, context engineering, agent memory, APIs, databases, cloud infrastructure.
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.
- Benefits and eligibility may vary by country of employment.
Compensation
USD 190,000 - 270,000 per year.
About the Team and Role
Pinecone is looking for an Applied AI Engineer who enjoys building real applications with AI. You will work across the stack, including backend services and retrieval pipelines, as well as APIs and user-facing applications, turning new AI capabilities into working solutions.
This is a hands-on engineering position for someone who prefers rapid iteration, experimenting with emerging technologies, and owning projects from initial idea through production. You will work closely with engineering and product teams, along with customers and partners, to explore new use cases, build reference applications, and demonstrate what can be built with Pinecone’s technology.
The ideal profile combines full-stack engineering strength with practical experience building LLM-powered applications and agentic systems. You should be comfortable discussing architecture, writing production code, and assembling working prototypes.
About Pinecone
Pinecone is the trusted AI knowledge company. Its trusted AI knowledge platform, including its Database, Nexus, and Marketplace products, powers 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.
Bonus Points
- Experience with Pinecone or other vector databases and search technologies.
- Experience building agentic applications, agent memory systems, or complex RAG pipelines.
- Contributions to open-source projects, developer tools, or technical communities.
- Experience working directly with customers on technical projects.
- Experience deploying and operating AI applications in production.
Location
United States (onsite)
