Principal Software Engineer - Builder Experience - Platform Engineering Productivity

Elastic, the Search AI Company, enables everyone to find the answers they need in real time, using all their data, at scale. Used by more than 50% of the Fortune 500, Elastic's complete, cloud-based solutions for search, security, and observability help organizations deliver on the promise of AI.

About the Role

Join our Platform Engineering Productivity team as a Principal Software Engineer. We’re looking for a systems-minded engineer who is curious by nature, stays current with AI and emerging tools, and takes ownership not only of what the team builds, but also how the team works.

In this role, you will help ensure Elastic products are delivered to customers with high quality while making the software development and release process more efficient for engineers across the organization. If you think systematically, thrive in ambiguity, and enjoy enabling teams to build and ship software effectively at scale, we’d love to hear from you.

What You Will Be Doing

• Build & Improve Frameworks: Improve frameworks, reusable components, and operational guidelines that help teams own the full software development lifecycle for their services.
• CI/CD & Artifact Management: Improve CI infrastructure reliability and efficiency while managing systems that produce releasable artifacts.
• Developer Environment & Release Gates: Enable ephemeral developer environments and define/enforce release quality gates.
• Tooling & Infrastructure: Develop tooling and infrastructure for product deployment and release.
• Code Quality & Technical Standards: Review code to uphold engineering standards, improve performance, and catch defects early.
• Cross-functional Collaboration: Collaborate with engineering and product teams to align on requirements, testing strategy, and delivery goals.
• Documentation & Mentorship: Drive clear technical communication, create high-quality architectural documentation, and mentor engineers to foster a culture of quality.

What You Bring

• Solid understanding of the full software development lifecycle (build, package, test, release, quality strategy).
• Deep experience in one or more programming languages such as Python, Go, Bash, Java, or Scala.
• Strong experience with CI/CD systems, Git, and modern release practices.
• Hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure and developer platforms, including Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker, configuration management tools, and major cloud providers.
• Proven track record of designing scalable systems and improving developer productivity through tooling and automation.
• Hands-on AI fluency, including integrating LLM APIs into production workflows and applying prompt engineering to domain-specific problems.
• Experience improving team engineering practices, code review quality, and developer efficiency.
• Excellent written and verbal technical communication skills in a globally distributed environment.

Compensation & Benefits

• Base Salary Range: €67,000 — €106,000 EUR
• Health coverage for you and your family
• Flexible work locations and schedules
• Generous paid vacation days
• Minimum 16 weeks of parental leave
• Charitable donation matching (up to $2,000/year) and 40 hours of volunteer time off