Senior Software Engineer - Performance Tuning - Elasticsearch

Elastic is a search AI company providing cloud-based solutions for search, security, and observability. The company is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join the Elasticsearch Performance team and improve Elasticsearch performance through high-quality code, technical analysis, optimization, profiling, benchmarking, and collaboration across engineering teams.

Responsibilities:

• Contributing to core performance engineering initiatives from development to production, focusing on the delivery of impactful optimizations. Executing technical designs and plans for architectural and code-level performance improvements
• Implementing foundational performance models and methodologies for complex, distributed systems
• Supporting optimization strategies to ensure Elasticsearch remains performant, predictable, and scalable in diverse environments
• Profiling and analyzing system behavior to identify bottlenecks in logging, metrics, vector search, and ES|QL
• Ensuring robust performance benchmarks and regression detection for both stateful and stateless (Serverless) architectures
• Collaborating with peers across the team to apply performance-focused development practices into new features
• Contributing to automation efforts by building AI-assisted optimization harnesses that streamline profiling, hypothesis testing, and benchmarking
• Providing technical guidance and peer reviews to other engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence

Requirements:

• You have deep knowledge of Java internals and JVM memory management. You understand how concurrency models work. You can write code that is high-performance, thread-safe, and lock-free. This experience includes working with large open-source and enterprise codebases
• You have proven experience in profiling and optimizing distributed systems. This includes deep experience with benchmarking tools (e.g., JMH, Rally), identifying performance regressions, and implementing algorithmic or hardware-aware optimizations
• You have a solid comprehension of distributed systems architecture, including partition tolerance, cluster state propagation, and scaling challenges in large-scale data stores
• You have a proven track record of using AI or advanced tooling to accelerate optimization, debug complex performance issues, and automate benchmarking workflows
• You possess the ability to collaborate effectively within a team environment, contributing to the success of performance engineering goals
• You possess the ability to collaborate across functions and teams and seamlessly transition between different projects, codebases, or teams based on business priorities
• You can work autonomously, drive decisions, and result in a distributed team by leveraging asynchronous, direct, and transparent communication
• Experience integrating high-performance native libraries (e.g., C++, Rust, SIMD-accelerated code) into Java applications
• Deep knowledge of modern storage engine performance, index modes, or vector search optimizations
• Experience defining and managing Performance SLAs and success criteria for distributed systems
• Experience working on the internals of a large-scale data store or search engine
• Experience working on the internals of a data store or search engine