# Senior Software Engineer - Performance Tuning - Elasticsearch

**Company**: Elastic
**Location**: United States
**Experience**: senior
**Job type**: full-time
**Salary**: $133,100-$210,600 USD
**Category**: Engineering
**Industry**: Technology

**Apply**: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/elastic/jobs/8119450?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_72669e4a-dd4

## 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.

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. Your goal is to help improve the optimization and predictability of Elasticsearch performance, collaborating with area-specific teams to enhance our software.

**Responsibilities**

- Contributing to core performance engineering initiatives from development to production, focusing on the delivery of impactful optimizations. Executing technical designs and plans for architectural and code-level performance improvements.

- Implementing foundational performance models and methodologies for complex, distributed systems.

- Supporting optimization strategies to ensure Elasticsearch remains performant, predictable, and scalable in diverse environments.

- Profiling and analyzing system behavior to identify bottlenecks in logging, metrics, vector search, and ES|QL.

- Ensuring robust performance benchmarks and regression detection for both stateful and stateless (Serverless) architectures.

- Collaborating with peers across the team to apply performance-focused development practices into new features.

- Contributing to automation efforts by building AI-assisted optimization harnesses that streamline profiling, hypothesis testing, and benchmarking.

- Providing technical guidance and peer reviews to other engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence.

**Requirements**

- You have deep knowledge of Java internals and JVM memory management. You understand how concurrency models work. You can write code that is high-performance, thread-safe, and lock-free. This experience includes working with large open-source and enterprise codebases.

- You have proven experience in profiling and optimizing distributed systems. This includes deep experience with benchmarking tools (e.g., JMH, Rally), identifying performance regressions, and implementing algorithmic or hardware-aware optimizations.

- You have a solid comprehension of distributed systems architecture, including partition tolerance, cluster state propagation, and scaling challenges in large-scale data stores.

- You have a proven track record of using AI or advanced tooling to accelerate optimization, debug complex performance issues, and automate benchmarking workflows.

- You possess the ability to collaborate effectively within a team environment, contributing to the success of performance engineering goals.

- You possess the ability to collaborate across functions and teams and seamlessly transition between different projects, codebases, or teams based on business priorities.

- You can work autonomously, drive decisions, and result in a distributed team by leveraging asynchronous, direct, and transparent communication.

**Nice to Have**

- Experience integrating high-performance native libraries (e.g., C++, Rust, SIMD-accelerated code) into Java applications.

- Deep knowledge of modern storage engine performance, index modes, or vector search optimizations.

- Experience defining and managing Performance SLAs and success criteria for distributed systems.

- Experience working on the internals of a large-scale data store or search engine.

- Experience working on the internals of a data store or search engine.

**Compensation** The typical starting salary range for this role is: $133,100-$210,600 USD The typical starting salary range for this role in select locations is: $159,900-$252,900 USD

## Skills

### Required
- Java
- JVM memory management
- concurrency models
- distributed systems
- performance optimization
- benchmarking tools
- AI-assisted optimization

### Nice to have
- high-performance native libraries
- modern storage engine performance
- vector search optimizations
- Performance SLAs

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Source: [Apply at job-boards.greenhouse.io](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/elastic/jobs/8119450?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply)