# Principal Software Engineer - Agent Builder - Search

**Company**: Elastic, the Search AI Company
**Location**: United Kingdom
**Work arrangement**: remote
**Experience**: senior
**Job type**: full-time
**Category**: Engineering
**Industry**: Technology

**Apply**: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/elastic/jobs/7815865
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_7e0cbad7-9ee

## Description

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

## Skills

### Required
- distributed systems
- Node/TypeScript
- API design
- observability
- LLM tooling
- GenAI architectures