Principal Software Engineer - Agent Builder - Search

Elastic is building Agent Builder, a conversational platform that connects production agents to real customer business data in Elasticsearch. As a Principal Engineer, you will set technical direction and drive the Kibana backend architecture for the agentic platform: streaming APIs, secure tool execution, session and memory persistence, retrieval and citations contracts, and evaluation telemetry.

Your influence will extend beyond a single feature, shaping service boundaries, reliability posture, and standards that other solutions build on.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture for chat back-end services (Node/TypeScript), defining service boundaries, data contracts, and scalability targets
• Lead cross-team design reviews; author ADRs and RFCs that become reference standards for AI-chat and ingestion work
• Build and harden event-driven pipelines that capture chat telemetry, evaluation traces, and LLM feedback loops; expose them via self-service analytics endpoints
• Champion reliability,define error budgets, introduce testing strategy, and steer incident-response playbooks for conversational workloads
• Mentor senior and Junior engineers; grow their system-design skills and foster a high-trust, low-ego culture
• Partner with Product, Design, and Data Science to translate ambiguous goals (e.g., “multi-step reasoning with tool calling”) into incremental, testable action items
• Represent Elastic in open-source AI communities (LangGraph/LangChain, MCP/A2A) through design proposals, blog posts, and conference talks

What You Bring

• 10 + years building distributed, production SaaS services,at least 5 years leading large-scale Node/TypeScript or similar back-end stacks
• Deep expertise in distributed systems fundamentals,shard routing, consensus, eventual consistency, back-pressure, and circuit-breaker patterns
• Demonstrated success designing high-throughput, low-latency APIs (gRPC / REST / WebSocket),including streaming responses and resumable sessions
• Hands-on experience with observability: OpenTelemetry, log/metric pipelines, synthetic checks, and SLO dashboards
• Exposure to LLM tooling (LangChain/LangGraph, OpenAI function calls, vector-search, RAG orchestration) and enthusiasm for advancing GenAI architectures
• Clear, persuasive written communication,your ADRs and RFCs set the standard others emulate

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