Staff+ Software Engineer, VectorDB
$320k - $485k • New York City, NY | Seattle, WA; San Francisco, CA | New York City, NY | Seattle, WA
Posted 21h ago
Job Location
New York City, NY | Seattle, WA; San Francisco, CA | New York City, NY | Seattle, WA
Tech Stack
Remote Work Policy
On-site
Categories
AI Infrastructure Engineer
About the job
Anthropic is seeking a Staff+ Software Engineer to enhance the vector search infrastructure powering Claude. This role is crucial for Claude's ability to access information, impacting web search, conversation memory, and model training. You will join a small, foundational team responsible for the architecture, performance, scalability, and cost of the vector database layer. As a hands-on engineer, you will contribute to coding and make key architectural decisions, shaping the future evolution of this critical system within the Databases organization.
Responsibilities
- Own the core vector database layer, including index structures, storage, query execution, and serving.
- Ensure production readiness through benchmarking, capacity planning, operational tooling, and onboarding new workloads.
- Manage trade-offs in recall, latency, and cost by optimizing quantization, filtering, index building, and scaling compute/storage.
- Scale throughput by an order of magnitude to meet growing research and training demands.
- Extend the retrieval stack to support hybrid retrieval, combining vector search with lexical search and fused ranking.
- Define the system's evaluation methodology, setting recall targets, latency objectives, and cost per query metrics.
- Set technical direction for the team, leading design reviews, making architectural decisions, and mentoring engineers.
- Participate in on-call rotations for owned systems.
Requirements
- Direct experience building and operating a production-scale vector database or approximate nearest-neighbor search system.
- Deep understanding of ANN index structures, vector quantization, and filtered search.
- Experience with search relevance and ranking.
- Strong systems programming skills in languages like Rust, C++, or Go, with experience in performance-critical and memory-intensive code.
- Experience designing and operating large-scale distributed storage or serving systems with strict latency and reliability requirements.
- Proven ability to independently scope and deliver ambiguous, multi-quarter technical projects.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, with experience driving cross-team alignment.
- Interest in AI safety and Anthropic's mission.
Benefits
- Annual compensation range: $320,000 - $485,000 USD
- Visa sponsorship available
- Hybrid work policy (at least 25% in office)