Software Engineer, Memory & Search

About Anthropic

Anthropics 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. We own how Claude remembers you and how it finds what it needs across Cowork and Claude Code. That spans the user-facing experience (what Claude remembers how people see and edit it how search surfaces the right conversation) and the shared infrastructure underneath it the memory service indexing retrieval and vector search.

Memory is one of the biggest levers on whether Claude feels like it knows you. We recently moved memory from a periodically synthesized summary to a dynamic editable on-demand system and then unified it so the same memory follows you across products. Search went from a top user complaint to something people rely on to find past work. The platform is now in place and the next phase is finding the product form factors that make memory the most compelling and sticky part of using Claude.

That is why we are hiring product engineers. The team is strong on infrastructure and we want people who have shipped user-facing products at scale have a sharp sense for what makes a product feel good and have built agentic systems where the model the tools and the user interface have to work together. You will run short demo-driven experiments on top of the memory and search stack decide what to keep based on real usage and help the whole team think like a product team. If you have founded a company been an early engineer at a startup or taken a product from zero to one you will recognize the way we want to work.

This is a trust-sensitive surface. Memory touches privacy consent and enterprise controls so you will work closely with product design privacy legal and safeguards and you will be expected to treat those constraints as part of good product design rather than obstacles to it.

Key responsibilities

• Design build and ship memory and search experiences in Cowork and Claude Code owning them end to end from the backend service through the models 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

Minimum qualifications

• 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 Anthropics 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

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.

For sales roles the range provided is the roles On Target Earnings (OTE) range meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.

Annual Salary:

$320000 - $485000 USD

Logistics

Minimum education: Bachelors degree or an equivalent combination of education training and/or experience

Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework training or professional experience

Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position

Location-based hybrid policy: Currently we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However some roles may require more time in our offices.

Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas! However we arent able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. But if we make you an offer we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this.

We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. Not all strong candidates will meet every single qualification as listed. Research shows that people who identify as being from underrepresented groups are more prone to experiencing imposter syndrome and doubting the strength of their candidacy so we urge you not to exclude yourself prematurely and to submit an application if youre interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones were building have enormous social and ethical implications. We think this makes representation even more important and we strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on our team.

Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams remember that Anthropic recruiters only contact you some cases we may partner with vetted recruiting agencies who will identify themselves as working on behalf of Anthropic. Be cautious of emails from other domains. Legitimate Anthropic recruiters will never ask for money fees or banking information before your first day. If youre ever unsure about a communication dont click any linksvisit

How were different

We believe that the highest-impact AI research will be big science. At Anthropic we work as a single cohesive team on just a few large-scale research efforts. And we value impact advancing our long-term goals of steerable trustworthy AI rather than work on smaller and more specific puzzles. We view AI research as an empirical science which has as much in common with physics and biology as with traditional efforts in computer science. Were an extremely collaborative group and we host frequent research discussions to ensure that we are pursuing the highest-impact work at any given time. As such we greatly value communication skills.

The easiest way to understand our research directions is to read our recent research. This research continues many of the directions our team worked on prior to Anthropic including: GPT-3 Circuit-Based Interpretability Multimodal Neurons Scaling Laws AI & Compute Concrete Problems in AI Safety and Learning from Human Preferences.

Come work with us!

Anthropic is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. We offer competitive compensation and benefits optional equity donation matching generous vacation and parental leave flexible working hours and a lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues. Guidance on Candidates AI Usage: Learn about our policy for using AI in our application process.

Required Experience:

IC