Senior Software Engineer - Observability, Managed Inputs

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.

What is The Role

As part of the Observability organization and inside the Streams program, the Managed Inputs team builds high-performing backend ingestion pipelines. We collect telemetry across diverse environments—including Elastic Agents, agentless setups, OpenTelemetry collectors, and cloud sources via Elastic Cloud Forwarders—then process and store this information to power seamless, intuitive user experiences within Kibana.

Elastic's Streams program is the unified platform for getting data into Elasticsearch from edge collection all the way through cloud processing. We accept any type of data generated at the edge (Elastic Agent, Elastic Classic APM Agents, Beats, any OTel SDK…) and process and route the data to several destinations.

We build performant, reliable, scalable, secure, and maintainable backend solutions for ingesting observability data. We take responsibility for what we build, keeping the system running, ensuring reliable quality gates and safe deployment mechanisms, as well as assisting in support cases.

What You Will Be Doing

• Design, implement, deploy, and maintain high-performing, scalable features within products such as Managed Inputs (mOTLP endpoints) and Managed Integrations (Agentless architecture) across major cloud providers.
• Take ownership of projects and features, leading them from concept to delivery.
• Provide engineering-level support to escalated customer cases on a rotation basis.
• Provide mentorship and feedback to peers through pull request reviews, ensuring code quality and promoting best practices.
• Monitor alerts, build SLIs and SLOs, and ensure system stability.
• Cultivate a positive, inclusive, and collaborative team culture across time zones.
• Participate in an on-call rotation for owned services (currently 12h/day/week every 8–10 weeks).

What You Bring

• Intermediate to expert Go skills with strong analytical, debugging, and troubleshooting capabilities.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, IaC (Terraform), and Kafka.
• At least intermediate experience with Observability (tracing, metrics, logs, profiling).
• Strong understanding of microservices architecture and distributed systems, including trade-offs and design challenges.
• A positive attitude, curious mindset, and commitment to learning and self-enablement.
• Ability to conduct root-cause analysis rather than accepting unexpected system behavior.
• Ability to work independently in a globally distributed team while actively collaborating and sharing knowledge.
• Experience with or interest in OpenTelemetry.
• Capability to drive decisions asynchronously and transparently in a distributed environment.
• Demonstrated experience leveraging AI-assisted development tools to accelerate feature development, debug complex systems, and optimize existing codebases.

Bonus Points

• Experience in designing scalable, high-availability services ingesting terabytes of data per day.
• Experience with operational stability as a responder or incident commander.
• Experience with Elasticsearch and/or Kibana.
• Passion for open-source development and contributions to community projects.
• Experience working in fully remote teams.

Benefits & Compensation

• Salary Range: €55,800 — €88,300 EUR
• Competitive pay based on role scope and expertise
• Comprehensive health coverage for you and your family
• Flexible work schedule and location flexibility
• Generous vacation days and annual PTO
• Up to 16 weeks of minimum parental leave
• Charitable donation matching up to $2,000 (or local equivalent)
• Up to 40 hours per year dedicated to volunteer projects