Consulting Architect - Search

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.

As a Senior Search Consulting Architect, you will serve as a hands-on technical authority and trusted implementation leader helping our enterprise customers unlock the full potential of Elasticsearch.

Responsibilities

• Elasticsearch Core Architecture: Translate business and functional requirements into highly resilient, scalable search architectures built natively on distributed Elasticsearch environments.
• Cluster Design & Governance: Lead technical execution and node blueprinting for enterprise customer engagements,including capacity planning, custom mappings, shard strategy, Index Lifecycle Management (ILM), and cross-cluster replication (CCR/CCS).
• Advanced Vector Search & AI Engineering: Deploy and operationalize semantic search implementations utilizing Elasticsearch’s native vector capabilities, including kNN, ELSER, hybrid retrieval, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines.
• Performance Tuning & Optimization: Profile, benchmark, and tune distributed search and indexing performance to meet demanding SLAs, optimizing JVM heap, garbage collection, caching layers, and Apache Lucene segment merging.
• High-Throughput Ingestion: Build robust ingestion pipelines and bulk indexing strategies handling high-volume workloads while optimizing cluster state performance and thread pools.
• Customer Engagement & Delivery: Serve as the lead technical consultant during client engagements, leading technical kickoff meetings, architectural reviews, and hands-on migration efforts.
• Field Insights & Feedback: Identify edge cases, bugs, and common architectural hurdles in field deployments, sharing structured feedback with Product Management and Core Support.
• Internal Mentorship: Document implementation patterns, contribute to standard delivery frameworks, and mentor team members to cultivate a culture of technical excellence.

Requirements

• 5+ years as a Solutions Architect, Lead Engineer, or Senior Systems Consultant with hands-on, deep technical expertise specifically focused on Elasticsearch in production environments.
• Solid understanding of distributed systems principles as applied to Elasticsearch, including node roles (master, data, ingest, ML), Apache Lucene indexing mechanics, and cluster state management.
• Proven track record of implementing semantic search solutions using Elasticsearch’s native ML nodes, dense/sparse vector fields, and modern NLP framework integrations.
• Practical experience deploying and managing Elasticsearch workloads on public cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) using Docker, Kubernetes, or Terraform.
• Proficiency in at least one modern programming language (e.g., Java, Python, Go) with experience using official Elasticsearch client libraries.
• Strong presentation and technical writing skills, with a proven ability to guide developer teams, customer architects, and IT managers through complex technical choices.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical industry experience.
• Comfortable working across distributed teams and traveling to customer sites as required for key project milestones.

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