Principal Software Engineer (Search Infrastructure, Elasticsearch)

Join Elastic, a company dedicated to building a robust and feature-rich search experience. As a Principal Software Engineer, you will define, direct, and build the next generation of Elasticsearch capabilities. You will work closely with partners and product teams to understand their needs and shape the long-term technical vision for search at Elastic. This role offers flexible location and schedule, fully paid health coverage, generous vacation days, and more.

• Defining, directing, and building the next generation of Elasticsearch capabilities, with a focus on core search infrastructure.
• Researching advances in search infrastructure, data structures, and retrieval algorithms to ensure efficient and powerful foundations for users.
• Collaborating with partners and product teams to understand their needs and help shape the long-term technical vision for search at Elastic.
• Experience mentoring expert engineers, providing both technical and professional guidance
• You work autonomously and can drive decisions and results in a distributed team by leveraging asynchronous, direct, and transparent communication
• Hands-on experience with search and indexing technologies such as Elasticsearch, Lucene, or Solr
• Experience leading technical projects in the search infrastructure and distributed systems space. You bring proven knowledge in building and operating sophisticated search platforms and engineering robust, high-performance software systems
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills. Collaborating across distributed teams is challenging, we value being supportive, empathetic, and trusting in all interactions, and we expect the same from everyone on the team
• Able to work with a high level of autonomy, tackling projects and guiding them from concept to completion, including both technical design and collaboration with other engineers to develop the necessary components
• You possess the ability to collaborate across functions and teams and seamlessly transition between different projects, codebases, or teams based on business priorities
• You have a proven track record of using AI to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimize code, while still owning the final outcomes
• Experience defining a long-term technical vision for a core search or retrieval system, working across teams and organizations to collaboratively shape the technical roadmap
• Experience with large-scale data or search systems such as Elasticsearch, Lucene, Solr, or distributed storage engines, and an understanding of how they work and why they work that way
• Strong skills in core Java and familiarity with advanced data structures and concurrency constructs, as well as newer language features like lambdas. You have a strong desire to optimize and leverage the most efficient algorithms and search data structures
• You've built things with Elasticsearch before, and you have experience in the search and information retrieval space and understand the constructs and theory behind it
• Experience working with open source projects and familiar with different styles of source control workflow and continuous integration