# Principal AI Engineer - Context - Agents and Context

**Company**: Elastic
**Location**: Ireland
**Work arrangement**: hybrid
**Experience**: senior
**Job type**: full-time
**Salary**: €104.800-€165.700 EUR
**Category**: Engineering
**Industry**: Technology

**Apply**: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/elastic/jobs/8223682?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_b2a22f47-de0

## 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.

The Context Engine team builds the knowledge layer that AI agents use to work with enterprise data in Elasticsearch. As a Principal AI Engineer, you own the improvement loop of this product end to end: how agents, automations and skills behave in production, how we observe them, how we evaluate them, and how we ship changes to them safely.

## Responsibilities

- Own the production improvement loop for Context Engine: understand how extraction automations, retrieval tools and memory behave, based on offline evaluations and customer conversations and telemetry.

- Define how we iterate on agents and skills safely: versioning and rollout of prompts, skills and automations, regression coverage, staged and shadow evaluation, and the guardrails that let us change behaviour without breaking customers.

- Design the telemetry we need to make data-informed engineering decisions: what to capture from agent traces, tool calls and knowledge retrieval, how it lands in Elasticsearch, and how it feeds evaluation, dashboards and the feedback loop.

- Partner with the data science team on evaluation strategy: golden datasets, evaluators to gate on quality, latency and cost.

- Raise the bar across the team: review designs and PRs, mentor engineers in eval-driven development, and write the technical proposals that shape the roadmap.

## Requirements

- 10+ years of software engineering experience, with the recent years spent shipping and operating AI-driven products on real production traffic.

- A track record of eval-driven product improvement: you have diagnosed agent or LLM behaviour from traces and user feedback, designed the evaluation that exposed the problem, shipped the fix and measured the outcome.

- Direct experience building agents with state and memory, and iterating on prompts, skills and tool behaviour safely in production.

- Familiarity with MCP, including exposing public MCP servers and tools.

- Experience designing telemetry for AI systems, and using it to make engineering and product decisions.

- Strong backend engineering skills in either Python or TypeScript: APIs, stateful workflows, data pipelines and production services.

- Comfort working with data scientists, engineers, and product managers as peers, translating between measurement and shipping, and communicating trade-offs clearly.

## 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
- TypeScript
- AI
- Machine Learning
- Elasticsearch
- MCP
- Telemetry
- Data Science

### Nice to have
- LangGraph
- CrewAI
- Claude Agent SDK
- Agentic retrieval
- Knowledge representation

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Source: [Apply at job-boards.greenhouse.io](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/elastic/jobs/8223682?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply)