Principal Software Engineer - Performance Tuning - Elasticsearch

Elastic, the Search AI Company, provides the Elastic Search AI Platform used by more than 50% of the Fortune 500 for search, security, and observability.

Principal Software Engineer on the Elasticsearch Performance team, leading architectural and code-level performance engineering initiatives to drive continuous optimization and predictability.

• Own performance engineering initiatives from architecture to production.
• Lead technical design and execution for major performance improvements.
• Develop performance models and methodologies for distributed systems.
• Profile and analyze system behavior to identify bottlenecks in logging, metrics, vector search, and ES|QL.
• Ensure robust performance benchmarks and regression detection for stateful and stateless (Serverless) architectures.
• Collaborate to embed performance-first thinking and mentor engineers.
• Design and build AI-assisted optimization harnesses.

• Deep knowledge of Java internals and JVM memory management.
• Understanding of concurrency models and high-performance thread-safe lock-free code.
• Experience with large open-source and enterprise codebases.
• Proven experience profiling and optimizing distributed systems, including benchmarking tools (flamegraphs, JMH, Rally).
• Solid comprehension of distributed systems architecture.
• Track record of using AI or advanced tooling to accelerate optimization.
• Ability to collaborate across teams and work autonomously in a distributed team.

• Experience integrating native libraries (C++, Rust, SIMD) into Java.
• Deep knowledge of storage engine performance, index modes, or vector search optimizations.
• Experience defining Performance SLAs.
• Experience working on internals of a large-scale data store or search engine.

Base salary only, no variable component. Typical starting salary range: 369,400 zł—584,300 zł PLN.

• Health coverage for you and your family in many locations.
• Flexible locations and schedules for many roles.
• Generous vacation days.
• Up to $2000 match for donations and service.
• Up to 40 hours volunteer time.
• Minimum 16 weeks parental leave.

Apply via the provided link.