Director of Software Engineering - Distributed Systems, Serverless - Elasticsearch

Elastic, the Search AI Company, enables organizations to find answers 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 search precision and AI intelligence across search, security, and observability.

What is The Role

We are looking for a Director of Software Engineering to lead our Elasticsearch Distributed Systems organization, which focuses on scale, performance, and resilience—especially in the context of our Serverless offering.

You will lead an organization of approximately 40 engineers and managers tackling complex distributed systems challenges. Your customers include every Elasticsearch user and each solution team building upon Elasticsearch.

Elastic is distributed by intention. We hire the best engineers wherever they are, collaborating daily across time zones via GitHub, Zoom, and Slack.

What You Will Be Doing

• Develop and execute a long-term engineering strategy for Elasticsearch's distributed systems, aligning technical priorities with product direction and business goals.
• Drive improvements in performance, scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency, including foundational capabilities supporting Serverless Elasticsearch.
• Lead the evolution of Elasticsearch's core distributed architecture, including cluster coordination, data allocation, indexing, replication, and recovery.
• Provide technical leadership and oversight for complex engineering initiatives, guiding engineering managers and technical leaders through architectural decisions and competing priorities.
• Own engineering outcomes across your organization, balancing technical complexity, customer impact, reliability, operational requirements, and maintainability.
• Lead, mentor, hire, and develop engineering managers and senior technical leaders, building a strong leadership pipeline and fostering an inclusive culture of technical excellence.
• Own organizational planning, staffing, and resource allocation to support strategic priorities.
• Partner with Product Management and engineering leaders across Elastic to define priorities and deliver multi-team initiatives.
• Act as a senior escalation point for critical technical and operational challenges alongside Support and SRE teams.
• Communicate engineering strategy, organizational priorities, and progress to executive leadership.
• Manage consistent performance processes, including promotions, development plans, and underperformance resolution.

What You Bring

• Proven track record leading large-scale engineering organizations, including managing managers and developing senior technical leaders.
• Hands-on software engineering background with deep computer science fundamentals and distributed systems depth.
• Extensive experience designing, building, or operating complex distributed systems (e.g., database engines, distributed storage, or large-scale data processing).
• Strong understanding of concurrency, consistency, replication, fault tolerance, recovery, and performance optimization.
• Demonstrated success establishing engineering strategy, making architectural trade-offs, and managing cross-team technical dependencies.
• Experience in organizational planning, senior-level hiring, and leadership development.
• Deep operational knowledge of production troubleshooting and distributed systems reliability at scale.
• Ability to partner effectively with senior product and engineering executives to deliver business outcomes.
• Compassionate, people-first leadership style with a commitment to coaching and mentorship.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with experience presenting technical strategy to executive leadership.