Core/ Infra - Senior Java Engineer - Elasticsearch

Elastic, the Search AI Company, enables everyone to find the answers they need in real time, using all their data, at scale. The Elastic Search AI Platform, used by more than 50% of the Fortune 500, brings together the precision of search and the intelligence of AI to enable everyone to accelerate the results that matter.

What Is the Role

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our Elasticsearch team and focus on ensuring that the shared platform functionalities of Elasticsearch are easy to use, performant, maintainable, and secure.

The team’s mission is to create foundational infrastructure and shared functionality that enables engineers to develop, extend, and support Elasticsearch. The team owns common functionality such as services, settings, and scripting, and makes Elasticsearch extensible through plugins or the Painless scripting language. The team also makes Elasticsearch observable by providing logging and telemetry information. We also own the orchestration of Elasticsearch in serverless, the CI/CD workflows, and enable Elasticsearch developers to deliver Elasticsearch to customers across serverless, cloud, and on-premise environments.

You will be a strong individual contributor on the team, while also contributing to and leading cross-team projects. We need someone with great design skills who can work at a low level of abstraction and drive technical concepts across a variety of collaborators.

What You Will Be Doing

• Contributing to large, impactful projects that evolve the core infrastructure underpinning Elasticsearch.
• Making Elasticsearch developers more productive by identifying and developing opportunities for automation and integrating agentic apps into development workflows.
• Designing and implementing new horizontally scalable features and APIs in Elasticsearch.
• Solving complex issues, including performance and concurrency challenges, and proposing long-term solutions.
• Improving operation and observability of Elasticsearch cloud systems.
• Collaborating in the open with the ES team, Elastic users, and supporting open-source projects.
• Supporting support engineers with high-complexity technical problems.
• Owning operational investigations end-to-end until performance or stability issues are resolved.

What You Bring

• Strong proficiency in core Java, standard library data structures, concurrency constructs, and modern language features.
• Deep experience with low-level Java concepts, such as concurrency, parallelism, and classloaders.
• Hands-on experience crafting APIs and reasoning through architecture trade-offs.
• Proficiency in algorithms and data structures.
• Practical experience with CI/CD systems and practices (e.g., Buildkite, Argo CD, GitOps).
• Proven ability to lead large-scale projects across engineering teams.
• Track record of using AI tools to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimize code.
• Ability to work autonomously and drive decisions in a distributed team leveraging asynchronous, transparent communication.

Bonus Points

• Knowledge of JDK internals: modules, Java memory model, garbage collection, and caching techniques.
• Experience with observability and telemetry solutions, particularly OpenTelemetry.
• Familiarity with Go, containers, and Kubernetes.
• Experience with Java build tools, with a strong preference for Gradle.
• Experience working in a platform or developer productivity team.

Compensation and Benefits

• Starting salary range: €87,300 — €138,100 EUR
• Health coverage for you and your family
• Flexible work schedule and generous paid time off
• 16 weeks minimum paid parental leave
• Charitable donation matching up to $2,000/year and paid volunteer hours