Senior Software Engineer - Performance Tuning - Elasticsearch

About the Role

Elasticsearch powers search, observability, and AI retrieval (RAG) for the world's largest organizations. We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join the Elasticsearch Performance team. In this role, you will contribute to performance engineering initiatives through high-quality code and technical analysis to improve the optimization and predictability of Elasticsearch.

What You Will Be Doing

• Performance Engineering: Contribute to initiatives from development to production, executing technical designs for architectural and code-level improvements.
• Methodology: Implement foundational performance models and methodologies for complex, distributed systems.
• Optimization: Support strategies to ensure Elasticsearch remains performant, predictable, and scalable.
• Analysis: Profile system behavior to identify bottlenecks in logging, metrics, vector search, and ES|QL.
• Benchmarking: Ensure robust performance benchmarks and regression detection for stateful and stateless (Serverless) architectures.
• Collaboration: Work with peers to apply performance-focused development practices and provide technical guidance through peer reviews.
• Automation: Build AI-assisted optimization harnesses to streamline profiling, hypothesis testing, and benchmarking.

What You Bring

• Java Expertise: Deep knowledge of Java internals, JVM memory management, and concurrency models. Ability to write high-performance, thread-safe, and lock-free code.
• Distributed Systems: Proven experience in profiling and optimizing distributed systems, including partition tolerance and cluster state propagation.
• Tooling: Experience with benchmarking tools (e.g., JMH, Rally) and identifying performance regressions.
• AI Integration: Track record of using AI or advanced tooling to accelerate optimization and debug complex issues.
• Communication: Ability to work autonomously and drive decisions in a distributed team using asynchronous, transparent communication.

Bonus Points

• Experience integrating high-performance native libraries (C++, Rust, SIMD) into Java applications.
• Deep knowledge of modern storage engine performance, index modes, or vector search optimizations.
• Experience defining and managing Performance SLAs for distributed systems.
• Background in the internals of large-scale data stores or search engines.

Benefits

• Competitive pay and stock program participation.
• Company-matched 401k (up to 6%).
• Flexible locations and schedules.
• Generous vacation policy.
• Financial donation matching and volunteer time off.
• 16 weeks of parental leave.