Principal 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 solutions in search, security, and observability.

Join the Platform Engineering Productivity team as a Principal Software Engineer on AI Enablement and Developer Experience. Shape how Elastic engineers build and ship, making AI a genuine accelerant in the development lifecycle while ensuring high-quality product delivery.

• Define the technical vision for AI-assisted development across the org, from agent context standards to LLM-backed tooling.
• Identify high-leverage points in the SDLC where AI can reduce toil, then build and ship tooling.
• Design guardrails for fast and safe AI adoption, including quality gates and security boundaries.
• Improve CI infrastructure reliability and efficiency, and build systems that produce releasable artifacts.
• Enable ephemeral developer environments and build tooling for product deployment and release.
• Define and enforce release quality gates that scale across teams.
• Own metrics: cycle time, adoption, toil reduction.
• Review code to uphold standards, improve performance, and catch defects early.
• Partner with engineering and product leadership on requirements and delivery goals.
• Drive technical communication and produce high-quality documentation.
• Mentor engineers and cultivate a culture of code quality and AI fluency.

• Deep, hands-on fluency with AI-assisted development, integrating LLM APIs into production systems.
• Prompt-engineering mindset applied to real domain problems.
• Judgment to know when AI is the right answer.
• Comfort moving across projects, codebases, and evolving team structures.
• High agency and full ownership of outcomes with systems thinking.
• Natural curiosity and self-teaching.

Base salary only, no variable component. Typical starting salary range: €80,400—€127,200 EUR.

• Health coverage for you and your family in many locations
• Generous number of vacation days each year
• Minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave

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