Senior Platform Productivity Engineer - Core/Infra - Elasticsearch

Elastic; Canada; Remote; CAD 128,000 - 203,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage

Flexible locations

Vacation days

Donation matching

Volunteer hours

Parental leave

Job summary

Elastic, the Search AI Company, seeks a Senior Platform Productivity Engineer for the Elasticsearch team. You’ll build and maintain shared infrastructure, services, settings, and scripting, enabling developers to extend Elasticsearch with secure, observable, and scalable features.

You will lead cross-team work, design low-abstraction solutions, and drive automation across complex codebases, while collaborating with global teams and users.

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience with CI/CD systems and practices (Buildkite, Argo CD, GitOps).
• Experience crafting APIs and reasoning through tradeoffs.
• Proficiency in algorithms and data structures.
• Experience in core Java and standard libraries, including concurrency constructs.
• Knowledge of Java build tools (Gradle, Maven).
• Experience with large codebases and distributed systems.
• Experience leading large-scale projects across engineering teams.
• Ability to own projects end-to-end with technical and cross-functional collaboration.
• Track record of using AI to accelerate development and debugging.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to large projects that evolve Elasticsearch core infrastructure.
• Improve developer productivity by automation and integrating agentic apps.
• Design and implement scalable features and APIs.
• Address performance and concurrency issues with solutions.
• Improve operation and observability of cloud systems.
• Collaborate openly with Elastic teams, users, and OSS projects.
• Support engineers with challenging problems.
• Own end-to-end investigations until issues are resolved.

Skills

CI/CD systems

APIs design

Algorithms and data structures

Core Java

Java build tools

Large code bases

Project leadership

AI-assisted development

Cross-functional collaboration

Distributed systems

Tools

Gradle

Maven

OpenTelemetry

Kubernetes

Go

Job description

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. By taking advantage of all structured and unstructured data — securing and protecting private information more effectively — Elastic’s complete, cloud-based solutions for search, security, and observability help organizations deliver on the promise of AI.

What is The Role:

We are on the lookout for a Senior Platform Productivity Engineer to join our Elasticsearch team and focus on ensuring that 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. We also own the orchestration of Elasticsearch in serverless, the CI/CD workflows and enable Elasticsearch developers to deliver Elasticsearch to customers - serverless, cloud and on-premise alike.

You will be a strong individual contributor on the team but you will also contribute to and lead cross team projects. We need someone who has great design skills, who can work at a low level of abstraction but can equally drive and communicate technical concepts across a variety of collaborators.

What You Will Be Doing:

• Contributing to large, impactful projects that evolve the core infrastructure that underpins Elasticsearch.
• Making Elasticsearch developers more productive by identifying and developing opportunities for automation, and integrating agentic apps into development workflows.
• Designing and implementing new horizontally-scalable features and APIs in Elasticsearch.
• Solving difficult issues, including performance or concurrency issues, and proposing solutions.
• Improving operation and observability of Elasticsearch cloud systems.
• Collaborating in the open with the ES team, Elastic users, and other supporting open source projects.
• Supporting our support engineers with the harder problems.
• Owning operational investigations end-to-end, until performance or stability issues are successfully resolved.

What You Bring:

• Hands-on experience with CI/CD systems and practices (Buildkite, Argo CD, GitOps etc).
• Experience crafting APIs and the ability to reason through tradeoffs.
• Proficiency in algorithms and data structures.
• Experience in core Java and are conversant in the standard library of data structures and concurrency constructs, as well as newer language features.
• Knowledge of Java build tools (Gradle, Maven, etc), with a strong preference for Gradle experience.
• Experience working with large (millions of code lines) code bases.
• Experience leading large scale projects across engineering teams.
• Willingness to dive into new issues and ask for help when you need it.
• You are able to own projects from beginning to end. This covers both technical design and working with others to develop needed components.
• You have a proven track record of using AI to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimize code, while still owning the final outcomes.
• You possess the ability to collaborate across functions and teams and seamlessly transition between different projects, codebases, or teams based on business priorities
• You can work autonomously, drive decisions and results in a distributed team by leveraging asynchronous, direct, and transparent communication.

Bonus Points:

• Experience working in a platform team or developer productivity team
• Experience with low-level Java such as concurrency, parallelism, classloaders, etc.
• Knowledge of JDK internals: modules, the Java memory model, garbage collection, database load, caching techniques, etc.
• Experience with observability and telemetry solutions, particularly OpenTelemetry
• Knowledge of Go
• Knowledge of containers and Kubernetes

Additional Information - We Take Care of Our People:

As a distributed company, diversity drives our identity. Whether you’re looking to launch a new career or grow an existing one, Elastic is the type of company where you can balance great work with great life. Your age is only a number. It doesn’t matter if you’re just out of college or your children are; we need you for what you can do.

We strive to have parity of benefits across regions, and while regulations differ from place to place, we believe taking care of our people is the right thing to do.

• 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
• Increase your impact - We match up to $2000 (or local currency equivalent) for financial donations and service
• Up to 40 hours each year to use toward volunteer projects you love
• Embracing parenthood with a minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave

Security & Privacy Responsibilities: Take ownership of protecting the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of organizational data and systems by following applicable privacy and security policies, standards, and procedures. Ensure that all individual contributions follow Elastic’s Secure Software Development Framework (SSDF). Proactively participate in mandatory role-based training to ensure personal technical execution consistently aligns with the highest standards of data protection, data privacy, and system resilience.

Different people approach problems differently. We need that. Elastic is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to creating an inclusive culture that celebrates different perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, ethnicity, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, disability status, or any other basis protected by federal, state or local law, ordinance or regulation.

We welcome individuals with disabilities and strive to create an accessible and inclusive experience for all individuals. To request an accommodation during the application or the recruiting process, please email [e-mail]. We will reply to your request within 24 business hours of submission.

Applicants have rights under Federal Employment Laws and can view the following posters linked below:

Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) Poster

Employee Polygraph Protection Act (EPPA) Poster

Elasticsearch develops and distributes technology and information that is subject to U.S. and other countries’ export controls and licensing requirements for individuals who are located in or are nationals of the following sanctioned countries and regions: Belarus, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, or Russia, including the Ukrainian territories annexed by Russia (The Crimea region of Ukraine, The Donetsk People's Republic (DNR), The Luhansk People's Republic (LNR), Kherson or Zaporizhzhia). If you are located in or are a national of one of the listed countries or regions, an export license may be required as a condition of your employment in this role. Please note that national origin and/or nationality do not affect eligibility for employment with Elastic.

Please see here for our Privacy Statement.

Compensation for this role is in the form of base salary. This role does not have a variable compensation component. The typical starting salary range for new hires in this role is listed below.

These ranges represent the lowest to highest salary we reasonably and in good faith believe we would pay for this role at the time of this posting. We may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range, and the ranges may be modified in the future.

An employee's position within the salary range will be based on several factors including, but not limited to, relevant education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, geographic location, performance, and business or organizational needs.

Elastic believes that employees should have the opportunity to share in the value that we create together for our shareholders. Therefore, in addition to cash compensation, this role is currently eligible to participate in Elastic's stock program. Our total rewards package also includes a company-matched Registered Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP) with dollar-for-dollar matching up to 6% of eligible earnings, along with a range of other benefits offered with a holistic emphasis on employee well-being.

The typical starting salary range for this role is:

$128,300—$203,000 CAD

Vacancy Status: This is a posting for an existing vacancy. We are actively seeking to fill this position with a qualified candidate.