Staff+ Software Engineer, Memory & Search

Title: Staff+ Software Engineer, Memory & Search Location: New York City, NY; New York City, NY | Seattle, WA; Remote-Friendly, United States; San Francisco, CA | New York City, NY | Seattle, WA

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