Engineering Manager, Search

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

Lead and grow the team of engineers building Anthropic's search platform: indexing, retrieval, ranking and serving

Own the strategy and roadmap for the platform and how Claude's search needs are met over time

Own search quality: evaluation methodology, relevance measurement, regression detection and the ranking improvements they drive

Operate the platform at scale, balancing product traffic against research and training demand while holding a high bar on reliability, latency and cost

Wear the product hat when the work calls for it: prioritize what the search experience needs, sequence launches and represent search in product discussions

Drive cross-team collaboration with product, research and infrastructure partners; articulate dependencies, risks and progress clearly

Be hands-on where it matters: design reviews, incident follow-ups and the occasional deep dive into why relevance moved

Recruit, close and retain strong engineers in a competitive market

Minimum Qualifications

Significant experience managing engineering teams, including hiring and growing a team through rapid change

Direct experience building or operating search systems at scale: indexing, retrieval, ranking or query serving

Enough technical depth to be hands-on when needed; you can review designs, read code and engage credibly with senior ICs

A product mindset and comfort making product calls when there isn't a PM in the room

A track record of running high-scale, latency-sensitive production systems with real reliability requirements

Strong cross-functional skills; you can align product, research and infrastructure partners with different priorities

Experience recruiting and closing senior engineers

Interest in AI safety and Anthropic's mission

Preferred Qualifications

Experience with the economics of search: index freshness, storage and serving costs, quality vs cost tradeoffs

Background in embeddings, ranking models or ML-based retrieval

Experience migrating traffic off a vendor onto in-house infrastructure

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.

Annual Salary:

$320,000—$405,000 USD

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.

How we're different

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.