Senior Software Engineer

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 for search, security, and observability solutions.

Elasticsearch powers search, observability, and AI retrieval (RAG) for the world's largest organizations. We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join the Elasticsearch Performance team. You will contribute to performance engineering initiatives through high-quality code and technical analysis, helping improve the optimization and predictability of Elasticsearch performance.

• Contributing to core performance engineering initiatives from development to production.
• Executing technical designs for architectural and code-level performance improvements.
• Implementing foundational performance models and methodologies for complex distributed systems.
• Profiling and analyzing system behavior to identify bottlenecks in logging, metrics, vector search, and ES|QL.
• Ensuring robust performance benchmarks and regression detection for stateful and stateless (Serverless) architectures.
• Building AI-assisted optimization harnesses for profiling, hypothesis testing, and benchmarking.
• Providing technical guidance and peer reviews.

• Deep knowledge of Java internals and JVM memory management.
• Understanding of concurrency models; ability to write 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 (e.g., JMH, Rally).
• Solid comprehension of distributed systems architecture, including partition tolerance and cluster state propagation.
• Track record of using AI or advanced tooling to accelerate optimization and automate benchmarking.
• Ability to collaborate across functions and work autonomously in a distributed team.

• Experience integrating high-performance native libraries (e.g., C++, Rust, SIMD) into Java applications.
• Deep knowledge of storage engine performance, index modes, or vector search optimizations.
• Experience defining Performance SLAs for distributed systems.

Base salary only; no variable component. Typical starting salary range: €87,300—€138,100 EUR.

• Competitive pay based on work, not previous salary.
• 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 financial donations and service.
• Up to 40 hours/year for volunteer projects.
• Minimum 16 weeks of parental leave.

Elastic is an equal opportunity employer. To request accommodation, email candidate_accessibility@elastic.co.