Staff Software Engineer, Search

Precision Labs; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 320,000 - 405,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Equity donation matching

Generous vacation & parental leave

Flexible working hours

SF office space

Job summary

Anthropic, headquartered in San Francisco, is building a scalable search platform to empower Claude with fast information access. You will design and implement core search systems, working with a small, senior team of engineers and researchers to deliver high-quality search capabilities.

The role emphasizes building distributed systems, improving search quality, and delivering efficient indexing and ranking.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in a relevant field.
• 5+ years building distributed systems in production.
• Solid grasp of indexing, retrieval, and ranking in search systems.
• Strong coding skills in Python, Go, or Java.
• Hands-on experience with high-volume data processing architectures.

Responsibilities

• Build Anthropic’s search platform from scratch.
• Establish metrics and tooling to measure and improve search quality.
• Enhance search algorithms and indexing mechanisms to boost efficiency and accuracy.

Skills

Distributed systems

Search fundamentals

Programming languages

Data processing architectures

Education

Bachelor's degree

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

We're building Anthropic's search platform team to create scalable, efficient search capabilities that power Claude's ability to access and retrieve information. In this role, you'll design and implement core search systems from the ground up.

Responsibilities:

• Work with a small, senior team of engineers and researchers to build Anthropic’s search platform from scratch
• Establish metrics and tooling to measure and improve search quality
• Enhance search algorithms and indexing mechanisms to boost search accuracy and efficiency

You may be a good fit if you:

• 5+ years building complex distributed systems in production
• Solid grasp of search fundamentals: indexing, retrieval, ranking
• Strong coding skills in Python, Go, Java, or similar languages
• Hands‑on experience with high‑volume data processing architectures

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.

For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings (\"OTE\") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.

Annual Salary: $320,000 — $405,000 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.

Not all strong candidates will meet every single qualification as listed. Research shows that people who identify as being from under‑represented 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. 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.

Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams, remember that Anthropic recruiters only contact you [e-mail] 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.

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.

Come work with us!

Anthropic is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. We offer competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and a lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues. Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage:Learn about our policy for using AI in our application process.