Staff Vector DB Engineer — Scale, Performance & Recall

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

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.