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. In this role, you will contribute to performance engineering initiatives through high-quality code and technical analysis, helping improve the optimization and predictability of Elasticsearch performance.

• Contribute to core performance engineering initiatives from development to production, focusing on impactful optimizations.
• Execute technical designs for architectural and code-level performance improvements.
• Implement foundational performance models and methodologies for complex distributed systems.
• Support optimization strategies to keep Elasticsearch performant, predictable, and scalable.
• 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; 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) and identifying performance regressions.
• 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.

• 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 and success criteria.
• Experience working on internals of a large-scale data store or search engine.

Base salary range: €67,000—€106,000 EUR. No variable compensation component. Benefits include health coverage for you and family in many locations, flexible locations and schedules, generous vacation days, up to $2000 match for donations and service, 40 hours volunteer time, and minimum 16 weeks parental leave.

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