Engineering Manager, Search

Anthropic$320K — $405K *
Consumer Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-7 years of experience managing engineering teams in fast-paced environments
  • Hands-on experience building or operating search systems at scale
  • Strong technical foundation for design reviews and code evaluations
  • Ability to make product decisions in the absence of a project manager
  • Proven track record with high-scale, reliable production systems
  • Excellent cross-functional collaboration skills with diverse teams
  • Experience in recruiting and retaining senior engineering talent
  • Genuine interest in AI safety and the mission of Anthropic

Responsibilities

  • Lead and cultivate a team responsible for the search platform
  • Develop and maintain the strategic vision for Claude's search capabilities
  • Ensure high search quality through comprehensive evaluation and improvement measures
  • Manage platform operations at scale while ensuring reliability and performance
  • Take a product-centric approach in shaping the user search experience
  • Facilitate collaboration among product, research, and infrastructure teams
  • Engage directly in technical discussions and incident resolutions
  • Recruit and retain top engineering talent in a competitive market

Benefits

  • Opportunity to work on cutting-edge search technology within AI
  • Grow leadership skills in a rapidly evolving tech environment
  • Engage with interdisciplinary teams for comprehensive product development
  • Influence user experience and product direction directly
  • Support for visa sponsorship and hybrid work arrangements
Full Job Description
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.

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 [redacted].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.

About Anthropic

Anthropic is an artificial intelligence research lab that focuses on developing AI systems that are safe, reliable, and trustworthy. The company was founded in 2019 by Dr. Yoshua Bengio, a leading AI researcher and winner of the Turing Award. Anthropic's research is focused on developing AI systems that can learn from small amounts of data, reason about complex systems, and interact with humans in a natural way. The company is based in New York City and has a team of experienced AI researchers and engineers.
Learn more about Anthropic
Size
50 employees
Industry
Founded
2019

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