Engineering Manager, Search

Anthropic•San Francisco, CA

2d•$320,000 - $405,000•Hybrid

About The Position

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.

Requirements

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

Nice To Haves

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

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