# Senior Engineer, Competitive Benchmarking & Performance **Company**: Elastic **Location**: United Kingdom **Experience**: senior **Job type**: full-time **Category**: Engineering **Industry**: Technology **Apply**: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/elastic/jobs/8306622?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply **Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_51c1fdec-c94 ## Description 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 are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to lead competitive benchmarking initiatives within the Elasticsearch Performance team. You will develop representative workloads, automate reproducible experiments, and investigate how Elasticsearch compares with alternative systems. ## Responsibilities - Own prioritized competitive benchmarking initiatives across search, vector and hybrid retrieval, and analytical and observability workloads. - Build and maintain automated benchmark harnesses, datasets, query sets, and load profiles that reflect real-world usage, including concurrent ingestion and querying. - Design fair comparisons with documented system versions, configurations, tuning decisions, resource budgets, and functional differences. - Evaluate latency distributions, throughput, resource consumption, and cost efficiency. For retrieval workloads, measure performance at comparable recall or relevance targets. - Adapt and extend workload-appropriate tools such as Elasticsearch Rally, ClickBench, and vector search benchmark frameworks. - Investigate performance differences using profiling, system metrics, and controlled experiments; collaborate with engineering teams to identify causes and validate improvements. - Evaluate relevant self-managed and managed cloud deployments, including serverless offerings, accounting for scaling behavior and service constraints. - Work with engineering and technical content partners to publish reproducible benchmark artifacts and clear technical reports that explain methodology, findings, limitations, and tradeoffs. - Partner with engineering and product management to prioritize benchmark coverage and translate findings into actionable product improvements. ## Requirements - Solid software engineering skills, with experience building maintainable automation and analysis tools in Python or another relevant programming language. - Hands-on experience evaluating and diagnosing performance in distributed systems, databases, or search infrastructure. - Depth in at least one relevant area (search, vector retrieval, analytical databases, or observability systems) and the ability to learn unfamiliar systems. - Experience designing representative datasets and workloads, including query patterns, concurrency, and ingestion behavior. - Sound experimental judgment, including repeated measurements, variability analysis, warm-up and cache effects, and the distinction between meaningful changes and measurement noise. - Experience building reproducible test environments and documenting configurations, procedures, and results. - Clear technical writing and communication skills, with the ability to explain complex findings and their limitations. - Solid collaboration skills and the ability to turn performance evidence into applicable engineering recommendations. ## Nice to Have - Experience with Elasticsearch, Lucene, Rally, ClickBench, or vector search benchmark frameworks. - Experience measuring retrieval quality alongside latency, throughput, and resource usage. - Familiarity with cloud performance and cost analysis, including autoscaling and serverless systems. - Public technical writing, open-source contributions, or published benchmark studies. ## 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 ## Skills ### Required - Python - software engineering - performance evaluation - distributed systems - databases - search infrastructure ### Nice to have - Elasticsearch - Lucene - Rally - ClickBench - vector search benchmark frameworks - cloud performance - cost analysis --- Source: [Apply at job-boards.greenhouse.io](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/elastic/jobs/8306622?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply)