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Industry R&D
Engineering Manager, Search
Anthropic
San Francisco, CA +1
Description
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 an Engineering Manager to lead the Search Platform team. This team builds the search stack behind Claude: the indexes, retrieval and ranking systems and serving infrastructure that power web search across claude.ai, the API and agentic surfaces.
Search is core to how Claude answers questions about the world, and the team owns both the problem and the solution end to end: growing the index, improving retrieval quality and running the serving stack at production scale. The same platform also serves research workloads, so demand comes from multiple user surfaces, often at the same time.
The role carries a product dimension. Search sits close to the user experience and PM coverage is thin at times, so often the EM helps decide what a good search experience looks like, not just how to build it. You'll partner with product teams shipping search-backed features, research teams that depend on retrieval quality and capacity, and the infrastructure teams that run the systems underneath.
We're looking for someone with real search experience who can be hands-on when needed: reviewing designs, digging into relevance regressions and holding their own in technical debates.
Key Responsibilities
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Lead and grow the team of engineers building Anthropic's search platform: indexing, retrieval, ranking and serving
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Own the strategy and roadmap for the platform and how Claude's search needs are met over time
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Own search quality: evaluation methodology, relevance measurement, regression detection and the ranking improvements they drive
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Operate the platform at scale, balancing product traffic against research and training demand while holding a high bar on reliability, latency and cost
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Wear the product hat when the work calls for it: prioritize what the search experience needs, sequence launches and represent search in product discussions
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Drive cross-team collaboration with product, research and infrastructure partners; articulate dependencies, risks and progress clearly
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Be hands-on where it matters: design reviews, incident follow-ups and the occasional deep dive into why relevance moved
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Recruit, close and retain strong engineers in a competitive market
Minimum Qualifications
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Significant experience managing engineering teams, including hiring and growing a team through rapid change
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Direct experience building or operating search systems at scale: indexing, retrieval, ranking or query serving
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Enough technical depth to be hands-on when needed; you can review designs, read code and engage credibly with senior ICs
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A product mindset and comfort making product calls when there isn't a PM in the room
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A track record of running high-scale, latency-sensitive production systems with real reliability requirements
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Strong cross-functional skills; you can align product, research and infrastructure partners with different priorities
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Experience recruiting and closing senior engineers
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Interest in AI safety and Anthropic's mission
Preferred Qualifications
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Experience with the economics of search: index freshness, storage and serving costs, quality vs cost tradeoffs
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Background in embeddings, ranking models or ML-based retrieval
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Experience migrating traffic off a vendor onto in-house infrastructure
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Exposure to LLM products and the retrieval demands of large-scale training and inference
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.