Anthropic
Staff+ Software Engineer, VectorDB
$320K–$485K
New York City, NY +5 · Staff · Full-time · Posted Oct 20, 2026
- Location
- New York City, NY
Seattle, WA
San Francisco, CA
New York City, NY
Seattle, WA
San Francisco, California, United States - Experience
- Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position.
- Education
- Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience; relevant field of study demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience.
- Visa sponsorship
- Visa sponsorship is available, but not guaranteed for every role or candidate; Anthropic says it will make every reasonable effort to obtain a visa for an offer recipient and provides an immigration lawyer.
About the job
Build and operate the production vector database and retrieval infrastructure that powers Claude’s search, memory, and model-training workloads.
What you'll do
- Own the vector database architecture, including indexes, storage, query execution, and serving; improve performance, scalability, and cost.
- Set production benchmarks and evaluation methods, and drive recall, latency, reliability, and throughput improvements.
- Set technical direction, lead design reviews, mentor engineers, collaborate across teams, and share on-call responsibilities.
What they ask for
- Production experience building a vector database or approximate nearest-neighbor search system at scale.
- Deep knowledge of ANN index structures, vector quantization, and filtered search; experience with search relevance and ranking.
- Strong systems programming skills in a language such as Rust, C++ or Go, and experience operating large-scale distributed storage or serving systems with strict latency and reliability requirements.
- Track record delivering ambiguous, multi-quarter technical projects; strong communication and alignment skills; interest in AI safety and Anthropic's mission.
Nice to have
- Experience with object-storage-backed or disaggregated database designs, full-text search engines, or hybrid retrieval systems.
- Familiarity with embedding models, LLM retrieval workloads, GPUs or other accelerators, or technical leadership in database/search infrastructure.
Pay
$320,000 — $485,000 USD (base salary)
Tools
Rust, C++, Go, BM25, GPUs
AI focus
Develop vector search infrastructure for Claude’s web search, conversational memory, and reinforcement-learning workloads that train future models.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative