Software Engineer, Memory & Search
New York City, NY · New York City, NY | Seattle, WA · Friendly · San Francisco, CA | New York City, NY | Seattle, WA · San Francisco · USD 320,000-485,000 / year · Posted Oct 19, 2026
At a glance
- Location
- New York City, NY · New York City, NY | Seattle, WA · Friendly · San Francisco, CA | New York City, NY | Seattle, WA · San Francisco
- Salary
- USD 320,000-485,000 / year · Base salary
- Visa sponsorship
- Visa sponsorship available
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 Software Engineers to join the Memory & Search team to own how Claude remembers and finds information across Claude.ai, Cowork, and Claude Code.
- This role involves designing and shipping user-facing memory and search experiences, running short demo-driven experiments, and shaping how Claude uses memory and retrieval within its agentic loop.
Responsibilities
- Design, build and ship memory and search experiences in Claude.ai, Cowork and Claude Code, owning them end to end from the backend service through the model's tools to the user interface
- Run product experiments on the memory and search stack: form a hypothesis, build a demo, put it in front of real users, measure, and make a clear persevere-or-pivot call
- Shape how Claude uses memory and retrieval inside its agentic loop, including what the model stores, when it searches, how results are ranked and presented, and how the user stays in control
- Define and track the metrics that tell us whether memory is actually making Claude more useful, and build the evaluations that keep quality honest as the system evolves
- Improve search relevance and recall across conversations and memories, working across embeddings, hybrid retrieval and ranking as well as the interface that presents results
- Partner with product, design, privacy, legal and safeguards to ship features that respect user consent and enterprise requirements such as customer-managed encryption keys and data retention policies
- Raise the bar on product quality for the team through design reviews, code reviews and the standards you set for latency, polish and reliability
- Share the on-call for the systems you own
Requirements
- Experience building and operating user-facing products used by a large number of people, including the backend services behind them
- Experience building agentic systems or LLM-powered products, including tool use, retrieval and prompt or context design
- Strong programming skills in Python and TypeScript, with experience across backend services and web front ends
- A track record of taking a product or feature from an idea to launch, and iterating on it based on usage data and user feedback
- Experience defining product metrics and running experiments to make decisions
- Strong product judgment: you notice when something feels off and you fix it, and you can explain why a design choice matters to users
- Strong written and verbal communication, with experience working closely with product managers, designers and non-engineering partners
- Interest in AI safety and Anthropic's mission
Preferred qualifications
- Experience as a founder, early-stage engineer, or someone who has taken a product from zero to one
- Experience building search or retrieval systems: embeddings, vector search, hybrid lexical and semantic retrieval, or ranking
- Experience building evaluations for LLM or ML systems, or measuring the quality of retrieval and ranking
- Experience on consumer products with strong retention, or on personalization systems
- Experience shipping features that handle sensitive data or meet enterprise requirements such as customer-managed encryption keys, data residency or HIPAA
- Experience with latency-sensitive, performance-critical product work
- Experience mentoring engineers or setting technical direction for a team
Benefits
- Competitive compensation and benefits
- Optional equity donation matching
- Generous vacation and parental leave
- Flexible working hours
Workplace
- Location-based hybrid policy requiring staff to be in one of the offices at least 25% of the time, though some roles may require more time in-office.
Skills
- Python
- TypeScript
- Embeddings
- Vector Search
- Hybrid Retrieval
- Ranking
- LLM-powered Products
- Retrieval Systems
