Update - I have joined Pinecone as a Senior Developer Advocate!

A 'period' (句号) in my run-on sentence of a job search adventure from the past year.

I am very happy to share that after quite a grueling year (see below), I have joined Pinecone, the leading vector database, as a Senior Developer Advocate.

Joining Pinecone is quite a dream come true for me.

My career pivot

I pivoted my career from primarily enterprise SaaS (working for Looker, Singlestore, and Oracle Cloud) last year to fully embracing AI and LLMs roles. I spent some time at Infinitus working as an AI Engineer, using LLMs to solve real business problems. It lit a fire under me that working with LLMs is where my passion lies. Unfortunately, due to the tech economic environment at the time, I was among many who were laid off. I was obviously devastated as it truly was a dream role for me.

Two months after the layoff, I nearly signed an offer to join an open source security startup, but due to unforeseen circumstances, that offer never got to the pen-on-paper stage. That was devastating, and another unwelcomed bump in that unlucky year.

On Pinecone

However, it all worked out in the end because it led me to Pinecone.

Pinecone is the most popular vector database right now. Vector databases are crucial for storing and efficiently retrieving high-dimensional data (such as the meaning of words), enabling advanced AI and machine learning applications like ChatGPT and Claude. Pinecone is also one of the favorites among developers, which is the primary reason that brought me to it*. Vector storage is also one of the most important things to introduce long term memory and ensuring low hallucination rates for large language models.

* Thank you Rich for your intro to Pinecone, and all your mentorship and patience towards me

The care that the Pinecone team takes to ensure they have the most useful developer-oriented content, comprehensive (and delightful) documentation, use-case-focused quickstarts, production-ready Github code, and also content catered towards those new to LLMs + vector databases, they’ve truly covered the entire spectrum of the developer experience. And this is on top of a truly solid product that is currently sitting at #1 most subscribed SaaS product on Amazon Web Services Marketplace.

Pinecone truly is a company on fire, inside and outside. As Sheryl Sandberg once said, if you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat. Just get on.

“If you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat. Just get on” — Sheryl Sandberg

My interview process didn’t take a straight path, reflecting the non-linear nature of my career journey. I actually was interviewing for a Technical Product Marketing role, but eventually found my way to the Developer Advocacy team where both my external communication and technical skills would be much better used. I will likely write another blog on how I landed a role on a top-tier AI company in this (horrible) tech environment.

Thank you

I just wanted to share a small update to my growing community here that I have landed on an incredible opportunity.

In my previous article for resilience, I received a ton of positive and supportive messages from you all. For those that are rooting for me, I want to extend a large thank you. I likely don’t know you personally, but thank you for believing in a stranger that happens to write words down on a blog.

How to reach me

If you have any questions on large language models, use cases, RAG, vector databases, memory, and more, simply shoot me an email at jacky (dot) l (at) pinecone (dot) io. Or, simply reply to this email.

I don’t care to sell you a product — I just want you to be able to solve your problems and use cases. Or if I can’t, at least lend an ear.

So don’t be shy.