320K–485K USD / year
Staff+ Software Engineer, VectorDB
BackendHybrid — New York City, NY, Seattle, WA, San Francisco, CA
Published on 2026-10-20
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About this role
Build and operate the vector database and search infrastructure that supports Claude retrieval, memory, and model-training workloads. This hands-on staff-level role shapes the system’s architecture, performance, scalability, and cost as the platform grows.
About the company
Anthropic builds reliable and interpretable AI systems, including the Claude family of models, for businesses and developers. The company focuses on AI safety research and practical AI assistants for enterprise and consumer use.
The team
Databases organization; works closely with the Search Platform and Memory & Search teams.
Stack
RustC++GoANNBM25GPUs
What you'll do
- Own vector database architecture, indexing, storage, query execution, and serving
- Benchmark production readiness, plan capacity, onboard workloads, and develop operational tooling
- Optimize recall, latency, and cost across quantization, filtered search, and index strategies
- Scale throughput and identify architecture, hardware, or engineering bottlenecks
- Extend retrieval toward hybrid lexical and vector search with fused ranking
- Define evaluation targets and regression detection for recall, latency, and cost
- Set technical direction, lead design reviews, and mentor engineers
- Share on-call responsibilities for owned systems
What we're looking for
- Production experience building a vector database or ANN search system at scale
- Deep knowledge of ANN indexes, vector quantization, and filtered search
- Experience with search relevance and ranking
- Strong Rust, C++, or Go systems programming skills, including performance-critical code
- Experience operating large-scale distributed storage or serving systems with strict latency and reliability requirements
- Track record delivering ambiguous, multi-quarter technical projects independently
- Strong written and verbal communication and cross-team alignment skills
- Interest in AI safety and Anthropic’s mission
Nice to have
- Experience with object-storage-backed or disaggregated database architectures
- Experience with full-text search engines or hybrid retrieval
- Familiarity with embeddings and LLM training and inference retrieval needs
- Experience using GPUs or other accelerators for index building or search
- Technical leadership on a database or search infrastructure team
Benefits
- Generous vacation and parental leave
- Flexible working hours
- Optional equity donation matching