Senior Software Engineer - Storage Engine - Elasticsearch

Elastic, the Search AI Company, enables everyone to find the answers they need in real time, using all their data, at scale , unleashing the potential of businesses and people.

We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join the Elasticsearch - Storage Engine team. This globally distributed, fully remote team of experienced engineers develops core storage and query technologies for observability workloads, including improving storage efficiency, advancing ES|QL query processing and performance, and optimizing data layouts for object storage.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the architectural evolution of core storage engine components, continuously identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks in indexing layouts, serialization formats, and resource utilization.
• Lead cross organisational initiatives to drive and build industry-leading observability solutions.
• Work with a globally distributed team of experienced engineers focused on the logs and metrics capabilities of Elasticsearch.
• Drive continuous operational and system improvements by introducing best practices for clean coding standards, demystifying complex system behaviours, untangling complexity to bring architectural clarity across the platform.
• Serve as a subject matter expert (SME) across key areas of Elasticsearch, acting as a trusted technical advisor and mentor to the wider engineering organisation.
• Work with a global community to triage, resolve, and review issues and pull requests, collaborating with domain experts as needed.
• Write idiomatic modern Java -- Elasticsearch is 99.8% Java!

Requirements:

• You possess the ability to collaborate across functions and teams and seamlessly transition between different projects, codebases, or teams based on business priorities.
• You work autonomously and can drive decisions and results in a distributed team by leveraging asynchronous, direct, and transparent communication.
• You have a proven track record of using AI to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimise code, while still owning the final outcomes.
• You bring a prompt-engineering mindset to know how to leverage AI agents effectively, using sound engineering judgement to validate results and recognise its limitations.
• You have implemented novel techniques to efficiently index, store, and query time-series or logs data.
• You have experience with one or more data storage technologies like Elasticsearch, Solr, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, or Prometheus and have some idea how they work and why they work that way.
• You have strong core Java skills, a deep understanding of its concurrency primitives, with a proven ability to design and optimise efficient data structures and algorithms.
• You excel in a collaborative environment, actively participate in technical discussions, and work effectively across distributed teams.
• You have excellent verbal and written communication skills and collaborate with respect, empathy, and professionalism in a distributed team.

Nice to Have:

• You've built things with Elasticsearch before.
• You've worked with open source projects and are familiar with different styles of source control workflow and continuous integration.
• You’ve worked on data storage technology.
• You have experience designing, leading, and owning cross-functional initiatives.
• You have past working experience with database, search engine, OS, or cloud service development.

Benefits:

• Competitive pay based on the work you do here and not your previous salary.
• Health coverage for you and your family in many locations.
• Ability to craft your calendar with flexible locations and schedules for many roles.
• Generous number of vacation days each year.
• Increase your impact - We match up to $2000 (or local currency equivalent) for financial donations and service.
• Up to 40 hours each year to use toward volunteer projects you love.
• Embracing parenthood with minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave.