Staff+ Software Engineer, VectorDB
New York City, NY | Seattle, WA · San Francisco, CA | New York City, NY | Seattle, WA · San Francisco · USD 320,000-485,000 / year · Hybrid · Posted Oct 20, 2026
At a glance
- Workplace
- Hybrid
- Location
- New York City, NY | Seattle, WA · 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 a Staff+ Software Engineer to work on the vector search infrastructure behind Claude.
- You'll join a small team responsible for the vector database layer that serves Claude's retrieval workloads: its architecture, performance, scalability and cost.
- This is a foundational role where core architectural decisions are still open and you will shape how the system evolves.
Responsibilities
- Own the core of Anthropic's vector database layer: index structures, storage layout, query execution and the serving layer
- Own production readiness - benchmarking against exact search, capacity planning, onboarding new workloads, and the operational tooling to run it at scale
- Drive the recall, latency and cost trade-offs - quantization, filtered search, index build and refresh strategy, and how compute and storage are separated and scaled
- Scale throughput by an order of magnitude as research and training demand grows, and work out whether the bottleneck is architecture, hardware or engineering bandwidth
- Extend the retrieval stack toward hybrid retrieval - lexical search and fused ranking alongside vector search
- Set the evaluation methodology for the system - recall targets, latency objectives, cost per query, and the regression detection that keeps them honest
- Set technical direction for a growing team - lead design reviews, make architectural decisions others build on, and mentor the engineers joining the effort
- Share the on-call for the systems you own
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 (graph-based, clustering-based or disk-resident approaches), vector quantization and filtered search
- Experience with search relevance and ranking
- Strong systems programming skills in a language such as 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, with 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/or experience in a field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience
Preferred qualifications
- Experience with object-storage-backed or disaggregated compute and storage database designs
- Experience building or operating full-text search engines (inverted indexes, BM25) or hybrid retrieval systems
- Familiarity with embedding models and the retrieval demands of LLM training and inference
- Experience using GPUs or other accelerators for index build or search
- Prior experience as a technical lead on a database or search infrastructure team
Benefits
- Competitive compensation and benefits
- Optional equity donation matching
- Generous vacation and parental leave
- Flexible working hours
Workplace
- Location-based hybrid policy expecting staff in an office at least 25% of the time, though some roles may require more time in offices.
Skills
- Rust
- C++
- Go
- ANN
- Vector Database
- Approximate Nearest-neighbor Search
- Vector Quantization
- Filtered Search
- Search Relevance
- Ranking
- Distributed Storage
- Object-storage
Show all 15 skills
- Full-text Search Engines
- BM25
- Hybrid Retrieval
