Engineering Manager, Search

The shape of it

In the posting’s own words

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.

What it asks for · 8

• 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

Also a plus

• 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

What the job covers

• 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

Tools and skills named

Words the posting leans on

• search21×
• product18×
• experience15×
• retrieval11×
• ranking9×
• infrastructure8×
• platform8×
• research8×
• serving8×
• cost6×
• engineers6×
• quality6×
• systems6×
• demand5×
• designs5×
• hands-on5×

Counted from the posting after the mission statement and the legal notices are set aside. The ones near the top are the ones a screener is looking for.

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