Principal Software Engineer - Search Infra - Elasticsearch

Elastic, the Search AI Company, enables everyone to find the answers they need in real time, using all their data, at scale — unleashing the potential of businesses and people. 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.

About the Role

We're looking for a Principal Software Engineer to join the Elasticsearch - Search Infra team. This globally-distributed team of experienced engineers focuses on delivering a robust and feature-rich search experience, including contributing to improving the search experience in Lucene.

This is a principal software engineering role that entails using your vast knowledge in this space in order to define, direct, and build the next generation of Elasticsearch capabilities. This role provides technical vision and direction for Elasticsearch’s core search infrastructure, including indexing, retrieval, and relevance, and requires deep expertise in search internals and cross-team collaboration.

Our company is distributed by intention. We hire the best engineers we can find wherever they are, whoever they are. We collaborate across continents every day over email, GitHub, Zoom, and Slack.

What You Will Be Doing

• Lead Core Search Evolution: Define, lead, and contribute to the evolution of core search and indexing capabilities.
• Research & Innovation: Research advances in search infrastructure, data structures, and retrieval algorithms to ensure we’re building the most efficient and powerful foundations for our users.
• Technical Vision: Work closely with partners and product teams to understand their needs and help shape the long-term technical vision for search at Elastic.
• Roadmap Drive: Bring your past experience with large-scale search systems to drive an innovative roadmap for Elasticsearch’s indexing, query execution, and relevance layers.
• Domain Expertise: Act as the go-to expert for several areas of Elasticsearch, continuously improving them through your insights and instincts.

What You Will Bring

• Technical Leadership: Experience leading technical projects in the search infrastructure and distributed systems space. You bring proven knowledge in building and operating sophisticated search platforms and engineering robust, high-performance software systems.
• Mentorship: Experience mentoring expert engineers, providing both technical and professional guidance.
• Strategic Roadmap Design: Experience defining a long-term technical vision for a core search or retrieval system, working across teams and organizations to collaboratively shape the technical roadmap.
• Search Technology Expertise: Hands-on experience with search and indexing technologies such as Elasticsearch, Lucene, or Solr.
• Core Java Skills: Strong skills in core Java and familiarity with advanced data structures and concurrency constructs, as well as newer language features like lambdas.
• Autonomy: Ability to work with a high level of autonomy, tackling projects and guiding them from concept to completion, including both technical design and collaboration with other engineers.
• Scale Experience: Experience with large-scale data or search systems and an understanding of how they work and why they work that way.
• Communication: Excellent verbal and written communication skills. We value being supportive, empathetic, and trusting in all interactions.

Bonus Points

• You've built things with Elasticsearch before, and you have experience in the search and information retrieval space and understand the constructs and theory behind it.
• Experience working with open source projects and familiarity with different styles of source control workflow and continuous integration.

Benefits & Perks

• Competitive pay based on the work you do here and not your previous salary.
• Health coverage for you and your family in many locations.
• Ability to craft your calendar with flexible locations and schedules for many roles.
• Generous number of vacation days each year.
• Charitable donation matching up to $2,000 (or local currency equivalent) per year.
• Up to 40 hours each year to use toward volunteer projects you love.
• Minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave.