Staff VectorDB Engineer - Scalable Retrieval Architect

Anthropic Limited; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 320,000 - 485,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Equity donation matching (optional)

Generous vacation and parental leave

Flexible working hours

Office space

Job summary

Anthropic is seeking a Staff+ Software Engineer to accelerate the vector search infrastructure behind Claude, including index structures and storage layout. You will own the core serving layer and drive recall, latency, and cost trade-offs at scale.

Based in Seattle, you will work with the Databases team to shape architecture, tooling, and cross-team collaboration, mentoring engineers while shipping production systems for real users.

Qualifications

• Direct experience building vector databases or production-scale NN search systems.
• Deep knowledge of ANN index structures, vector quantization and filtered search.
• Experience with search relevance and ranking in large-scale systems.
• Strong systems programming skills in Rust, C++, or Go with performance focus.
• Experience designing and operating large-scale distributed storage/serving systems.
• Track record delivering ambiguous, multi-quarter technical projects.
• Clear written and verbal communication across teams.
• Interest in AI safety and Anthropic's mission.

Responsibilities

• Own the core of Anthropic's vector database layer: index structures, storage layout, query execution and serving.
• Ensure production readiness, benchmarking, capacity planning and operational tooling.
• Drive recall, latency, and cost trade-offs including quantization and hybrid retrieval strategies.
• Scale throughput as demand grows, identifying bottlenecks in architecture or hardware.
• Extend retrieval stack toward hybrid retrieval and fused ranking.
• Set evaluation methodology for recall targets and latency objectives.
• Lead design reviews and mentor engineers joining the effort.
• Share on-call duties for owned systems.

Skills

Vector database production

ANN index structures

Search relevance & ranking

Systems programming (Rust/C++/Go)

Distributed storage/serving

Project scoping

Cross-team communication

AI safety interest

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

Rust

C++

Go

Job description

Anthropic is seeking a Staff+ Software Engineer to accelerate the vector search infrastructure behind Claude, including index structures and storage layout. You will own the core serving layer and drive recall, latency, and cost trade-offs at scale.

Based in Seattle, you will work with the Databases team to shape architecture, tooling, and cross-team collaboration, mentoring engineers while shipping production systems for real users.