Senior Software Engineer - 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, combines search and AI for search, security, and observability solutions.

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, improving 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 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 and 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 scaling challenges.
• Track record of using AI or advanced tooling to accelerate optimization and automate benchmarking.
• Ability to collaborate across teams and work autonomously in a distributed team.

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

Compensation is base salary only. Typical starting salary range: $133,100—$210,600 USD. In select locations (Seattle WA, Los Angeles CA, SF Bay Area CA, NYC Metro Area), alternate range: $159,900—$252,900 USD. Eligible for Elastic's stock program.

• Company-matched 401k (dollar-for-dollar up to 6% of eligible earnings)
• Health coverage for you and your family
• Generous vacation days
• Minimum 16 weeks parental leave
• Up to $2000 match for financial donations and service
• Up to 40 hours/year for volunteer projects

Apply via the provided link.