Senior Software Developer - Performance Tuning - Elasticsearch

Elastic, the Search AI Company, enables everyone to find answers 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 search and AI. Elasticsearch powers search, observability, and AI retrieval (RAG) for the world's largest organizations.

We are seeking a Senior Software Developer to join the Elasticsearch Performance team. In this role, you will contribute to performance engineering initiatives through high-quality code and technical analysis, improving the optimization and predictability of Elasticsearch performance.

• Contribute to core performance engineering initiatives from development to production.
• Execute technical designs for architectural and code-level performance improvements.
• Implement foundational performance models and methodologies for complex 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 with peers to apply performance-focused development practices.
• Build AI-assisted optimization harnesses for profiling, hypothesis testing, and benchmarking.
• Provide technical guidance and peer reviews.

• Deep knowledge of Java internals and JVM memory management.
• Understanding of concurrency models and ability to write high-performance, thread-safe, lock-free code.
• Experience with large open-source and enterprise codebases.
• Proven experience in profiling and optimizing distributed systems, including benchmarking tools (e.g., JMH, Rally).
• Solid comprehension of distributed systems architecture, including partition tolerance, cluster state propagation, and scaling challenges.
• Track record of using AI or advanced tooling to accelerate optimization and automate benchmarking.
• Ability to collaborate effectively and work autonomously in a distributed team.

Bonus points: experience integrating high-performance native libraries (C++, Rust, SIMD) into Java applications, deep knowledge of storage engine performance, index modes, or vector search optimizations, experience defining Performance SLAs, and experience working on internals of large-scale data stores or search engines.

Base salary only, no variable compensation. Typical starting salary range: $128,300—$203,000 CAD. Eligible for Elastic's stock program. Company-matched RRSP with dollar-for-dollar matching up to 6% of eligible earnings.

Health coverage for you and your family, flexible locations and schedules, generous vacation days, up to $2000 match for financial donations and service, up to 40 hours volunteer time, minimum 16 weeks parental leave.

Apply via the provided link. For accommodation, email candidate_accessibility@elastic.co.