Principal Software Engineer - Search Infra - Elasticsearch

About the Role

Elastic is looking for a Principal Software Engineer to join the Elasticsearch Search Infra team. This globally-distributed team focuses on delivering a robust, feature-rich search experience, including core contributions to Apache Lucene. As a Principal Engineer, you will define the technical vision and direction for Elasticsearch’s core infrastructure, including indexing, retrieval, and relevance.

What You Will Be Doing

• Technical Leadership: Define, lead, and contribute to the evolution of core search and indexing capabilities.
• Research & Innovation: Explore advances in search infrastructure, data structures, and retrieval algorithms to build efficient, powerful foundations.
• Strategic Collaboration: Partner with product teams to shape the long-term technical roadmap for search at Elastic.
• Domain Expertise: Serve as the go-to expert for Elasticsearch internals, driving innovation in query execution and relevance layers.
• Distributed Collaboration: Work across continents using GitHub, Zoom, and Slack to maintain a high-performance, consensus-driven engineering culture.

What You Will Bring

• Experience: Proven track record leading technical projects in search infrastructure and distributed systems.
• Mentorship: Ability to provide technical and professional guidance to expert engineers.
• Technical Vision: Experience defining long-term roadmaps for core search or retrieval systems.
• Core Skills: Strong proficiency in Java, advanced data structures, and concurrency constructs.
• Domain Knowledge: Hands-on experience with Elasticsearch, Lucene, or Solr.
• Autonomy: Ability to guide projects from concept to completion with high levels of independence.
• Communication: Excellent verbal and written skills; a supportive and empathetic approach to distributed collaboration.

Bonus Points

• Prior experience building with Elasticsearch.
• Experience contributing to open-source projects and familiarity with various CI/CD workflows.

Benefits & Perks

• Competitive pay with stock program eligibility.
• Company-matched 401k (up to 6%).
• Flexible locations and schedules.
• Generous annual vacation policy.
• Support for volunteer projects and financial donation matching.
• Minimum 16 weeks of parental leave.