Staff+ Software Engineer, Memory & Search

Anthropic Limited; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 405,000 - 485,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Equity donation matching

Generous vacation and parental leave

Flexible working hours

Office space

Job summary

Anthropic Limited is hiring software engineers to join the Memory & Search team, building memory services, indexing, retrieval and vector search across Claude.ai, Cowork and Claude Code. You will work on memory design, experiments, and product-oriented development, collaborating with product, privacy, legal and safeguards to ensure privacy compliance and enterprise readiness.

You should have shipped user-facing products at scale, strong Python/TypeScript skills, and an interest in AI safety.

Job description

About Anthropic

Anthropic’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We want AI to be safe and beneficial for our users and for society as a whole. Our team is a quickly growing group of committed researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders working together to build beneficial AI systems.

About The Role

Anthropic is looking for Software Engineers to join the Memory & Search team. We own how Claude remembers you and how it finds what it needs, across Claude.ai, Cowork and Claude Code. That spans the user-facing experience (what Claude remembers, how people see and edit it, how search surfaces the right conversation) and the shared infrastructure underneath it, the memory service, indexing, retrieval and vector search.

Memory is one of the biggest levers on whether Claude feels like it knows you. We recently moved memory from a periodically synthesized summary to a dynamic, editable, on-demand system, and then unified it so the same memory follows you across products. Search went from a top user complaint to something people rely on to find past work. The platform is now in place, and the next phase is finding the product form factors that make memory the most compelling and sticky part of using Claude.

That is why we are hiring product engineers. The team is strong on infrastructure, and we want people who have shipped user-facing products at scale, have a sharp sense for what makes a product feel good, and have built agentic systems where the model, the tools and the user interface have to work together. You will run short, demo-driven experiments on top of the memory and search stack, decide what to keep based on real usage, and help the whole team think like a product team. If you have founded a company, been an early engineer at a startup, or taken a product from zero to one, you will recognize the way we want to work.

This is a trust-sensitive surface. Memory touches privacy, consent and enterprise controls, so you will work closely with product, design, privacy, legal and safeguards, and you will be expected to treat those constraints as part of good product design rather than obstacles to it.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build and ship memory and search experiences in Claude.ai, Cowork and Claude Code, owning them end to end from the backend service through the model's tools to the user interface
• Run product experiments on the memory and search stack: form a hypothesis, build a demo, put it in front of real users, measure, and make a clear persevere-or-pivot call
• Shape how Claude uses memory and retrieval inside its agentic loop, including what the model stores, when it searches, how results are ranked and presented, and how the user stays in control
• Define and track the metrics that tell us whether memory is actually making Claude more useful, and build the evaluations that keep quality honest as the system evolves
• Improve search relevance and recall across conversations and memories, working across embeddings, hybrid retrieval and ranking as well as the interface that presents results
• Partner with product, design, privacy, legal and safeguards to ship features that respect user consent and enterprise requirements such as customer-managed encryption keys and data retention policies
• Raise the bar on product quality for the team through design reviews, code reviews and the standards you set for latency, polish and reliability
• Share the on-call for the systems you own

Minimum Qualifications

• Experience building and operating user-facing products used by a large number of people, including the backend services behind them
• Experience building agentic systems or LLM-powered products, including tool use, retrieval and prompt or context design
• Strong programming skills in Python and TypeScript, with experience across backend services and web front ends
• A track record of taking a product or feature from an idea to launch, and iterating on it based on usage data and user feedback
• Experience defining product metrics and running experiments to make decisions
• Strong product judgment: you notice when something feels off and you fix it, and you can explain why a design choice matters to users
• Strong written and verbal communication, with experience working closely with product managers, designers and non-engineering partners
• Interest in AI safety and Anthropic's mission

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience as a founder, early-stage engineer, or someone who has taken a product from zero to one
• Experience building search or retrieval systems: embeddings, vector search, hybrid lexical and semantic retrieval, or ranking
• Experience building evaluations for LLM or ML systems, or measuring the quality of retrieval and ranking
• Experience on consumer products with strong retention, or on personalization systems
• Experience shipping features that handle sensitive data or meet enterprise requirements such as customer-managed encryption keys, data residency or HIPAA
• Experience with latency-sensitive, performance-critical product work
• Experience mentoring engineers or setting technical direction for a team

Annual Salary

$405,000—$485,000 USD

Logistics

• Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience
• Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience
• Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position
• Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices.
• Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. But if we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this.

How We're Different

We believe that the highest-impact AI research will be big science. At Anthropic we work as a single cohesive team on just a few large-scale research efforts. And we value impact — advancing our long-term goals of steerable, trustworthy AI — rather than work on smaller and more specific puzzles. We view AI research as an empirical science, which has as much in common with physics and biology as with traditional efforts in computer science. We're an extremely collaborative group, and we host frequent research discussions to ensure that we are pursuing the highest-impact work at any given time. As such, we greatly value communication skills.

The easiest way to understand our research directions is to read our recent research. This research continues many of the directions our team worked on prior to Anthropic, including: GPT-3, Circuit-Based Interpretability, Multimodal Neurons, Scaling Laws, AI & Compute, Concrete Problems in AI Safety, and Learning from Human Preferences.

We think AI systems like the ones we're building have enormous social and ethical implications. We think this makes representation even more important, and we strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on our team.

We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. Not all strong candidates will meet every single qualification as listed. Research shows that people who identify as being from underrepresented groups are more prone to experiencing imposter syndrome and doubting the strength of their candidacy, so we urge you not to exclude yourself prematurely and to submit an application if you're interested in this work.

Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams, remember that Anthropic recruiters only contact you from @anthropic.com email addresses. In some cases, we may partner with vetted recruiting agencies who will identify themselves as working on behalf of Anthropic. Be cautious of emails from other domains. Legitimate Anthropic recruiters will never ask for money, fees, or banking information before your first day. If you're ever unsure about a communication, don't click any links—visit anthropic.com/careers directly for confirmed position openings.

Come work with us!

• competitive compensation and benefits
• optional equity donation matching
• generous vacation and parental leave
• flexible working hours
• lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues

Anthropic is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage: Learn about our policy for using AI in our application process.