Search & retrieval roles and hiring trends

28 technical roles across 5 companies; median time listed 197 days. Sources are the official company job boards; counts are open postings, not hires.

Open roles

Technique demand

Evidence

Anthropic — Staff+ Software Engineer, Memory & Search: "ion) and the shared infrastructure underneath it, the memory service, indexing, retrieval and vector search. Memory is one of the biggest levers on whether Claude feels like it knows you. We recently" Anthropic — Staff Software Engineer, Search: "ish metrics and tooling to measure and improve search quality Enhance search algorithms and indexing mechanisms to boost search accuracy and efficiency You may be a good fit if you: 5+ years buildi"

Anthropic — Staff Software Engineer, Search: "ch platform from scratch Establish metrics and tooling to measure and improve search quality Enhance search algorithms and indexing mechanisms to boost search accuracy and efficiency You may be a good f" OpenAI — Software Engineer, Search Infrastructure: "est routing, and capacity planning, making informed tradeoffs between search quality, reliability, and compute cost. - Build experimentation tooling and automation to run reproducible A/B tests,"

Anthropic — Staff+ Software Engineer, Memory & Search: "e backend services behind them Experience building agentic systems or LLM-powered products, including tool use, retrieval and prompt or context design Strong programming skills in Pyt" OpenAI — Research Scientist / Research Engineer - Foundations, Search: "ls, or vector retrieval systems. - Familiarity with transformer-based LLMs and how embedding spaces can interact with language model objectives. - Research experience in areas such as"

Anthropic — Staff+ Software Engineer, Memory & Search: "ranking Experience on consumer products with strong retention, or on personalization systems Experience shipping features that handle sensitive data or meet enterprise requirements such as custo" Databricks — Staff Software Engineer, AI Search: "rything from Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), AI assistants, and recommendation systems to enterprise knowledge management, in-product search, and data exploration. As a Staff Engineer for Search,"

OpenAI — Software Engineer, Search Infrastructure: "into production. Our work spans search orchestration, model serving, experimentation, and distributed systems, with direct impact on answer quality, responsiveness, reliability, and efficiency a" OpenAI — Research Scientist / Research Engineer - Web Understanding and Structured Retrieval, Search: "ly driving open-ended technical problems from an initial idea through experimentation and implementation. - A first-principles approach to using AI and compute, with a willingness to rethink esta"

Company comparison

Method and limits

• Fetched from official Greenhouse/Ashby/Lever boards; descriptions drive technique detection.
• Technique detection is literal; a role can use a tool it does not name.
• Days open is today − first_published; very old postings may be evergreen requisitions.
• Compensation is omitted unless the posting states it.