Senior/Staff Site Reliability Engineer

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 9,000 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 has raised $138M in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, ICONIQ, Menlo Ventures, and Wing Venture Capital.

About the Team and Role

We are looking for a Senior / Staff Enterprise Platform Reliability Engineer to help make Pinecone reliable, deployable, upgradeable, and operable across enterprise environments.

This is a cross-product role spanning Pinecone’s database, knowledge engine, Nexus, and related systems. You will work at the intersection of product engineering, infrastructure, reliability, and enterprise deployment architecture.

You will help define how Pinecone runs across SaaS, BYOC, and future enterprise deployment models such as OEM and air-gapped environments. That includes deployment architecture, Kubernetes runtime patterns, upgrade safety, monitoring, alerting, customer-visible health, diagnostics, CI/CD, and enterprise-readiness validation.

This is not a traditional operations-only SRE role. We are looking for someone who can turn enterprise operational requirements into reusable product and infrastructure capabilities.

Responsibilities

You will:

• Design and improve deployment patterns across SaaS, BYOC, and future enterprise deployment models.

• Build Kubernetes-based runtime, deployment, and validation capabilities.

• Define safe upgrade, rollback, and version compatibility strategies.

• Improve observability, alerting, logging, and customer-visible health signals.

• Build tooling for deployment validation, diagnostics, and operational readiness.

• Work across Pinecone product teams to improve enterprise reliability and deployability.

• Collaborate with customer-facing teams and customers on complex enterprise environments.

• Improve CI/CD, release validation, and automated deployment checks.

• Help define what “enterprise-ready” means for current and future Pinecone products.

• Turn incidents, escalations, and deployment issues into durable engineering improvements.

Requirements

You should have:

• Strong Kubernetes experience, including deployments, networking, storage, secrets, and upgrades.

• Experience with at least one major cloud provider: AWS, GCP, or Azure.

• Experience operating production systems with clear reliability ownership.

• Experience with monitoring, alerting, logging, incident response, and operational diagnostics.

• Experience designing or operating SaaS, BYOC, self-managed, or regulated enterprise environments.

• Ability to debug complex systems across application, infrastructure, networking, and customer-environment boundaries.

• Ability to write production-quality code in a language such as Go, Python, Java, Rust, or similar.

• Understanding of CI/CD, release engineering, automated validation, and rollback strategies.

• Clear communication and strong ownership across engineering and customer-facing teams.

Bonus Points

• Experience with BYOC, self-managed, OEM, or air-gapped deployments.

• Experience with stateful distributed systems such as databases, search systems, storage systems, streaming systems, or ML infrastructure.

• Experience designing upgrade strategies for distributed or stateful systems.

• Experience with enterprise requirements such as SSO, private networking, audit logs, hardened images, compliance constraints, and customer-controlled infrastructure.

• Experience building deployment tooling, operators, controllers, or internal developer infrastructure.

• Experience turning production incidents or customer escalations into product improvements.

Perks and 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.

Equal Opportunity Statement

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging are part of how Pinecone builds teams. Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply for jobs unless they believe they meet every qualification in a job description. Our top priority is finding the best candidate for the job. If you are interested in the position, we encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every qualification listed.

All qualified applicants will receive consideration 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.