Senior Java Engineer - Core / Infra - Elasticsearch

Elastic is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join the Elasticsearch team and focus on ensuring 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, owns the orchestration of Elasticsearch in serverless, CI/CD workflows, and enables delivery across serverless, cloud, and on-premise environments.

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, including integrating agentic apps into development workflows.
• Designing and implementing new horizontally-scalable features and APIs in Elasticsearch.
• Solving complex performance and concurrency issues, proposing robust solutions.
• Improving operation and observability of Elasticsearch cloud systems.
• Collaborating openly with the Elasticsearch team, users, and open-source projects.
• Supporting support engineers with escalated, complex problems.
• Owning operational investigations end-to-end until stability or performance issues are resolved.

What You Bring

• Experience designing APIs and reasoning through architectural tradeoffs.
• Proficiency in algorithms and data structures.
• Strong skills in core Java, standard library concurrency constructs, and modern Java language features.
• Experience with low-level Java internals, including concurrency, parallelism, and classloaders.
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD systems and practices (e.g., Buildkite, Argo CD, GitOps).
• Experience leading large-scale projects across distributed engineering teams.
• Ability to drive technical design and execution end-to-end autonomously.
• Track record of utilizing AI tooling to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimize code.
• Strong communication skills suited for distributed, asynchronous collaboration.

Bonus Points

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

Benefits

• Competitive base salary based on role complexity and market benchmarks
• Health coverage for you and your family
• Flexible work schedule and locations
• Generous vacation days
• Minimum of 16 weeks paid parental leave
• Charitable donation matching up to $2,000 USD per year
• Up to 40 hours per year of paid volunteer time