Principal Software Engineer I - Platform Billing Core

Elastic is the Search AI Company, providing cloud-based solutions for search, security, and observability. The Principal Software Engineer will drive technical direction for the Billing Core domain, designing scalable systems and improving reliability, operations, and developer productivity across billing services. The role partners with Product, SRE, Cloud Infrastructure, Design, and Finance teams while mentoring engineers and leading technical initiatives.

Responsibilities:

• Own complex billing and account management systems that span multiple services and cloud providers
• Build large-scale data pipelines for billing data ingestion, transformation, and reconciliation
• Improve observability, incident response, and reliability of core billing systems using modern DevOps practices
• Shape system architecture for scale and modularity. Guide service design, API structure, and data modelling
• Work with SRE and Cloud teams to improve deployment, monitoring, and CI/CD pipelines
• Own PostgreSQL data architecture and performance. Focus on query speed, schema quality, and high availability
• Be the go-to technical reviewer for the billing core stack. Maintain technical consistency and quality standards
• Mentor engineers and tech leads across the Billing organization. Help raise the bar on design and operational standards
• Work with Product, Design, and Finance to set roadmap priorities. Make sure plans are feasible and aligned with business goals
• Take part in on-call rotations. Make sure systems are production-ready through automation, resilience testing, and alerting

Requirements:

• 8+ years in backend or platform engineering, with solid skills in Python and PostgreSQL (schema design, performance, high availability)
• Proven experience improving reliability, observability, and incident response in production systems
• Solid background in cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including networking, IAM, monitoring, and deployment
• Ability to lead multi-quarter projects across teams — building consensus and delivering results
• Track record of mentoring engineers, setting technical direction, and raising engineering standards
• Clear written and verbal communication skills
• Able to influence across teams and speak to both technical and non-technical partners
• Comfortable working on your own in a global, distributed, and async environment
• Able to work across projects, work across functions and teams, and adapt to changing team structures
• Track record of using AI to speed up development, debug complex systems, and improve code quality — while owning the outcomes
• Eligible to work in Department of Defense (DoD) Impact Level 4 or above cloud service environments
• Experience with SaaS billing, metering, or financial systems is a real plus