Staff+ Software Engineer, VectorDB

Anthropic; New York, Seattle, San Francisco (NY, WA, CA); On-site; USD 250,000 - 340,000; Full time

Job summary

Anthropic is seeking a Staff+ Software Engineer to advance the vector search infrastructure behind Claude. You will own the vector database layer, shape architecture, and drive performance, scalability, and cost decisions across production workloads.

You will work with the Databases organization and collaborate with the Search Platform and Memory & Search teams to optimize retrieval, memory, and ranking for billions of vectors.

Qualifications

• Production experience with vector databases or approximate nearest-neighbor search at scale.
• Strong systems programming in Rust, C++, or Go.
• Experience with distributed storage or serving systems needing low latency.

Responsibilities

• Own core vector database layer: index structures, storage layout, query execution, and serving layer.
• Ensure production readiness: benchmarking, capacity planning, onboarding new workloads, tooling.
• Drive recall, latency, and cost trade-offs: quantization, filtered search, index refresh strategy.
• Scale throughput to meet growing demand; identify bottlenecks in architecture, hardware, or bandwidth.
• Extend retrieval stack toward hybrid retrieval with lexical search and fused ranking.
• Set evaluation methodology: recall targets, latency objectives, cost per query.
• Lead design reviews and mentor engineers; set technical direction.
• Share on-call ownership.
• Direct experience building vector database in production at scale.
• Deep knowledge of ANN index structures and vector quantization.
• Experience with search relevance and ranking.
• Design and operate large-scale distributed storage/serving systems with strict latency.
• Deliver multi-quarter technical projects; drive alignment across teams.
• Strong written/verbal communication; align across teams with different priorities.
• Interest in AI safety and Anthropic's mission.

Skills

Rust

C++

Go

Distributed systems

Vector search

Search relevance & ranking

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 a Staff+ Software Engineer to work on the vector search infrastructure behind Claude. Retrieval is how Claude learns about the world. Web search across claude.ai, the API and agentic surfaces, memory across conversations, and the reinforcement learning workloads that train our next models all depend on fast, cheap, high-recall nearest-neighbor search over billions of vectors.

You’ll join a small team responsible for the vector database layer that serves Claude's retrieval workloads: its architecture, performance, scalability and cost. This is a foundational role. The team is small, core architectural decisions are still open, and the engineers who join now will shape how the system evolves.

The role sits in our Databases organization and works day to day with the Search Platform team, which owns web search indexing, retrieval and serving, and the Memory & Search team, which owns search and memory inside claude.ai.

We’re looking for someone who has built vector or search systems that ran in production, at scale, with real users and a real on-call. You’ll be hands‑on in the code, and you’ll also be the person deciding how the pieces fit together.

Key responsibilities

• Own the core of Anthropic's vector database layer: index structures, storage layout, query execution and the serving layer
• Own production readiness - benchmarking against exact search, capacity planning, onboarding new workloads, and the operational tooling to run it at scale
• Drive the recall, latency and cost trade‑offs - quantization, filtered search, index build and refresh strategy, and how compute and storage are separated and scaled
• Scale throughput by an order of magnitude as research and training demand grows, and work out whether the bottleneck is architecture, hardware or engineering bandwidth
• Extend the retrieval stack toward hybrid retrieval - lexical search and fused ranking alongside vector search
• Set the evaluation methodology for the system - recall targets, latency objectives, cost per query, and the regression detection that keeps them honest
• Set technical direction for a growing team - lead design reviews, make architectural decisions others build on, and mentor the engineers joining the effort
• Share the on‑call for the systems you own
• Direct experience building a vector database or approximate nearest‑neighbor search system that ran in production at scale
• Deep knowledge of ANN index structures (graph-based, clustering-based or disk‑resident approaches), vector quantization and filtered search
• Experience with search relevance and ranking
• Strong systems programming skills in a language such as Rust, C++ or Go, including performance‑critical and memory‑intensive code
• Experience designing and operating large‑scale distributed storage or serving systems with strict latency and reliability requirements
• A track record of independently scoping and delivering ambiguous, multi‑quarter technical projects
• Strong written and verbal communication, with experience driving alignment across teams with different priorities
• Interest in AI safety and Anthropic's mission

Preferred qualifications

• Experience with object‑storage‑backed or disaggregated compute and storage database designs
• Experience building or operating full‑text search engines (inverted indexes, BM25) or hybrid retrieval systems
• Familiarity with embedding models and the retrieval demands of LLM training and inference
• Experience using GPUs or other accelerators for index build or search