Principal Software Engineer - Storage Engine - Elasticsearch

Elastic, the Search AI Company, enables everyone to find the answers they need in real time using all their data at scale. They are seeking a Principal Software Engineer to join the Elasticsearch - Storage Engine team, responsible for driving the technical vision, architecture, and design of Elasticsearch's core storage and query engine.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the architectural evolution of core storage engine components, continuously identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks in indexing layouts, serialization formats, and resource utilization
• Lead cross organizational initiatives to drive and build industry-leading observability solutions
• Work with a globally distributed team of experienced engineers focused on the logs and metrics capabilities of Elasticsearch
• Drive continuous operational and system improvements by introducing best practices for clean coding standards, demystifying complex system behaviors, untangling complexity to bring architectural clarity across the platform
• Serve as a subject matter expert (SME) across key areas of Elasticsearch, acting as a trusted technical advisor and mentor to the wider engineering organization
• Work with a global community to triage, resolve, and review issues and pull requests, collaborating with domain experts as needed
• Write idiomatic modern Java -- Elasticsearch is 99.8% Java!

Requirements:

• You possess the ability to collaborate across functions and teams and seamlessly transition between different projects, codebases, or teams based on business priorities
• You work autonomously and can drive decisions and results in a distributed team by leveraging asynchronous, direct, and transparent communication
• You have a proven track record of using AI to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimize code, while still owning the final outcomes
• You bring a prompt-engineering mindset to know how to leverage AI agents effectively, using sound engineering judgment to validate results and recognize its limitations
• You have implemented novel techniques to efficiently index, store, and query time-series or logs data
• You have experience with one or more data storage technologies like Elasticsearch, Solr, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, or Prometheus and have some idea how they work and why they work that way
• You have strong core Java skills, a deep understanding of its concurrency primitives, with a proven ability to design and optimize efficient data structures and algorithms
• You excel in a collaborative environment, actively participate in technical discussions, and work effectively across distributed teams
• You have excellent verbal and written communication skills and collaborate with respect, empathy, and professionalism in a distributed team
• You've built things with Elasticsearch before
• You've worked with open source projects and are familiar with different styles of source control workflow and continuous integration
• You've worked on data storage technology
• You have experience designing, leading, and owning cross-functional initiatives
• You have past working experience with database, search engine, OS, or cloud service development