E242 Amir Sadoughi, Head of Engineering at Pinecone

Today's guest is Amir Sadoughi, Head of Engineering at Pinecone in New York. Founded in 2019, Pinecone is a fully managed vector database that makes it easy to add vector search to production applications. It combines state-of-the-art vector search libraries, advanced features such as filtering, and distribution infrastructure to provide high performance and reliability at any scale. No more hassles of benchmarking and tuning algorithms or building and maintaining infrastructure for vector search.

Pinecone have an expert team of engineers who have built large machine learning platforms, databases and search engines at the likes of AWS and Yahoo. Their scientists have transformed businesses with ML applications such as shopping recommendations, online advertising, semantic search, anomaly detection, and more. They also have top researchers who collectively have published more than 100 academic papers and patents on machine learning, systems and algorithms.

In today's episode, Amir will discuss:

Pinecone’s Similarity Search as a Service,

The journey of building the platform from idea to production,

Use cases of the benefits their service brings to customers,

Transitioning from a large corporation to the startup world, and

Interesting opportunities within the data engineering team