Senior Java Engineer - Core / Infra - Elasticsearch

Elastic, the Search AI Company, enables everyone to find the answers they need in real time, using all their data, at scale. The Elastic Search AI Platform, used by more than 50% of the Fortune 500, brings together the precision of search and the intelligence of AI. Elastic’s cloud-based solutions for search, security, and observability help organizations deliver on the promise of AI.

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our Elasticsearch team, focusing on ensuring that the shared platform functionalities of Elasticsearch are easy to use, performant, maintainable, and secure. The team owns common functionality such as services, settings, and scripting, and makes Elasticsearch extensible through plugins or the Painless scripting language. The team also makes Elasticsearch observable by providing logging and telemetry information, and owns the orchestration of Elasticsearch in serverless, CI/CD workflows, and delivery to customers.

• Contributing to large, impactful projects that evolve the core infrastructure underpinning Elasticsearch.
• Making Elasticsearch developers more productive by identifying and developing automation opportunities, and integrating agentic apps into development workflows.
• Designing and implementing new horizontally-scalable features and APIs in Elasticsearch.
• Solving difficult issues, including performance or concurrency issues, and proposing solutions.
• Improving operation and observability of Elasticsearch cloud systems.
• Collaborating in the open with the ES team, Elastic users, and other supporting open source projects.
• Supporting our support engineers with the harder problems.
• Owning operational investigations end-to-end until performance or stability issues are resolved.

• Experience crafting APIs and the ability to reason through tradeoffs.
• Proficient in algorithms and data structures.
• Strong skills in core Java, conversant in the standard library of data structures and concurrency constructs, as well as newer language features.
• Experience with low-level Java such as concurrency, parallelism, classloaders, etc.
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD systems and practices (Buildkite, Argo CD, GitOps etc).
• Experience leading large scale projects across engineering teams.
• Willingness to dive into new issues and ask for help when you need it.
• Ability to own projects from beginning to end, covering technical design and working with others.
• Proven track record of using AI to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimize code.
• Ability to collaborate across functions and teams and transition between projects, codebases, or teams.
• Can work autonomously, drive decisions and results in a distributed team using asynchronous, direct, and transparent communication.

• Knowledge of JDK internals: modules, the Java memory model, garbage collection, database load, caching techniques, etc.
• Experience with observability and telemetry solutions, particularly OpenTelemetry.
• Knowledge of Go.
• Knowledge of containers and Kubernetes.
• Knowledge of Java build tools (Gradle, Maven, etc), with a strong preference for Gradle experience.
• Experience working in a platform team or developer productivity team.

Competitive pay based on the work you do here and not your previous salary. Health coverage for you and your family in many locations. Ability to craft your calendar with flexible locations and schedules for many roles. Generous number of vacation days each year. We match up to $2000 (or local currency equivalent) for financial donations and service. Up to 40 hours each year to use toward volunteer projects you love. Embracing parenthood with minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave.