Strategic Overview
Staff+ Software Engineer, Memory & Search at Anthropic is a dev opportunity centered on the specialist responsibilities and outcomes described in the employer's listing.
The published role emphasizes work such as 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….
The role is listed for New York City, NY / Seattle, WA / Friendly, United States / San Francisco, CA with remote working arrangement, giving candidates the practical context needed to assess fit before applying.
Key information at a glance
About This Role
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.
Key Responsibilities & Objectives
- 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
Required Qualifications & Candidate Blueprint
- 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
Salary & Benefits
Published compensation: $405,000 – $485,000 USD
Salary Benchmark
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Full Job Description
The following is the complete job description supplied by the source. We sanitize unsafe markup and remove external links, but do not shorten or rewrite the employer's source content.
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. We own how Claude remembers you and how it finds what it needs, across Claude.ai, 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 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
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 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
The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.
For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.
Logistics
Minimum education: Bachelor’s 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 aren't 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 you're interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones we're 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 from @anthropic.com email addresses. In 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 you're ever unsure about a communication, don't click any links—visit anthropic.com/careers directly for confirmed position openings.
How we're 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. We're 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.
Editor’s Market Perspective (Our Custom Analysis)
Why This Position Matters
This dev opening is a useful opportunity for candidates whose experience matches the role-specific capabilities named in the listing. Its strongest career signal is the scope of the work itself — particularly 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 — rather than a generic title alone.
Resume & Application Strategy
For the application, mirror the employer's language where it truthfully matches your background: foreground the role-specific capabilities named in the listing, quantify outcomes from comparable work, and place the most relevant experience near the top of the resume. If the listing specifies tools, platforms, leadership scope, or domain experience, use those exact terms in context instead of presenting an unrelated keyword list.
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