Staff+ Software Engineer, VectorDB

Location: New York City, NY; Seattle, WA; or San Francisco, CA. Hybrid policy requires staff to work from one of the offices at least 25% of the time; some roles may require more office time.

Annual salary: $320,000–$485,000 USD.

Company

Anthropic builds reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems intended to be safe and beneficial for users and society.

What you will do

• Own the vector database layer behind Claude's retrieval workloads, including index structures, storage layout, query execution, and serving.
• Drive production readiness through benchmarking against exact search, capacity planning, workload onboarding, and operational tooling.
• Optimize recall, latency, and cost through quantization, filtered search, index build and refresh strategies, and separation of compute and storage.
• Scale throughput by an order of magnitude and determine whether bottlenecks arise from architecture, hardware, or engineering capacity.
• Extend retrieval toward hybrid search with lexical search and fused ranking, and define evaluation methods for recall, latency, cost per query, and regression detection.
• Set technical direction, lead design reviews, make architectural decisions, mentor engineers, and share on-call responsibility.

Requirements

• Direct experience building a vector database or approximate nearest-neighbor search system that ran in production at scale.
• Deep knowledge of ANN index structures, including graph-based, clustering-based, or disk-resident approaches, as well as vector quantization and filtered search.
• Experience with search relevance and ranking.
• Strong systems programming skills in 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, including experience driving alignment across teams with different priorities.
• Interest in AI safety and Anthropic's mission.
• Bachelor's degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and experience in a relevant field demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience.

Nice to have

• Experience with object-storage-backed or disaggregated compute and storage database designs.
• Experience building or operating full-text search engines, including inverted indexes and BM25, or hybrid retrieval systems.
• Familiarity with embedding models and retrieval demands for LLM training and inference.
• Experience using GPUs or other accelerators for index building or search.
• Prior experience as a technical lead on a database or search infrastructure team.

Culture & Benefits

• Collaborative work across research, engineering, policy, and business functions.
• Frequent research discussions focused on high-impact AI research and communication.
• Flexible working hours and an office environment for collaboration.
• Competitive compensation, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation, and parental leave.
• Visa sponsorship may be available, with reasonable efforts and immigration-lawyer support for eligible offers.