Director, Solutions Engineering
at Pinecone, San Francisco
About Pinecone
Pinecone is on a mission to build the search and database technology to power AI applications for the next decade and beyond. Our fully managed vector database makes it easy to add vector search to AI applications. Since creating the “vector database” category, demand has grown incredibly fast and it shows in our user base. We are a distributed team with clusters in New York, San Francisco, Tel-Aviv, and Manchester.
The Opportunity
The Director of Solutions Engineering will lead and manage a team of Solutions Engineers (SEs) to assist Pinecone users through the buying journey and into production successfully. This role will define best practices and processes around common SEs tasks that include (but not limited to); building technical presentations, building various demos, recruiting SEs, scoping cost/config best practices, driving proper POV procedures and getting users into production. This role will hire the SE team and work with Enablement to build the appropriate onboarding and enablement program(s). Note, that while this role is highly technical, their primary skill set is managing a technical team. This is NOT a developer level technician, this is a SE leader.
Role and hiring criteria:
Candidates must have been in a deeply technical SE Director role for a minimum of 5 years. 8 years of experience is strongly preferred
Candidates must have deep technical experience (either as an SE, SE leader or not) for a minimum of 5 years. 8 years is strongly preferred. This would capture candidates, for example, that were in product management or software development for a few years before moving to an SE role more recently
Candidates MUST have experience in one of the following:
Distributed databases or ML/Vector Embeddings
AI specific experience
Complex Infrastructure software
Candidates with experience with cloud vendors (AWS, Azure, Google) are preferred.
Candidates with experience in high growth start-ups are preferred but not required
“High growth start up” is defined as the period when companies were <$100m
Candidates from larger companies without this expertise are acceptable
Candidates must have strong communication, presentation, demoing, whiteboarding and POV experience
Location is SF