Principal Software Engineer - Search Infra - Elasticsearch

Elastic; Schweiz; Remote; CHF 140,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Elastic is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to join the Elasticsearch - Search Infra team. You will define and lead the evolution of core search and indexing capabilities, shaping the technical roadmap for Elasticsearch.

You will collaborate across distributed teams, mentor engineers, and bring deep expertise in search internals, indexing, and relevance to deliver fast, scalable search platforms.

Qualifications

• Experience leading technical projects in the search infrastructure and distributed systems space.
• Proven knowledge in building and operating sophisticated search platforms and high-performance software systems.
• Experience mentoring expert engineers and guiding technical roadmaps.

Responsibilities

• Define, lead, and contribute to the evolution of core search and indexing capabilities.
• Research advancements in search infrastructure, data structures, and retrieval algorithms.
• Collaborate with partners and product teams to shape long-term technical vision for search at Elastic.
• Drive an innovative roadmap for Elasticsearch’s indexing, query execution, and relevance layers.
• Be the go-to expert for Elasticsearch domains and improve them with your insights.

Skills

Large-scale systems

Java

Elasticsearch/Lucene

Distributed systems

Mentoring engineers

Technical vision

Cross-team collaboration

Tools

Elasticsearch

Lucene

Solr

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'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 principle 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. At our best, we write fast, scalable and intuitive software. We believe that the best way to do that is to empower individual engineers, code review every change, decide big things by consensus, and strive for incremental improvements.

What You Will Be Doing:

• As a full-time Elasticsearch contributor, you will define, lead, and contribute to the evolution of core search and indexing capabilities.
• You’ll research advances in search infrastructure, data structures, and retrieval algorithms to ensure we’re building the most efficient and powerful foundations for our users.
• You’ll work closely with our partners and product teams to understand their needs and help shape the long-term technical vision for search at Elastic.
• You’ll bring your past experience with large-scale search systems to drive an innovative roadmap for Elasticsearch’s indexing, query execution, and relevance layers.
• As an authority in several areas of Elasticsearch, you’ll be the go-to expert for those domains, continuously improving them through your insights and instincts.

What You Will Bring:

• 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.
• Experience mentoring expert engineers, providing both technical and professional guidance.
• 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.
• Hands-on experience with search and indexing technologies such as Elasticsearch, Lucene, or Solr.
• Strong skills in core Java and familiarity with advanced data structures and concurrency constructs, as well as newer language features like lambdas.
• You have a strong desire to optimize and leverage the most efficient algorithms and search data structures.
• Able 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 to develop the necessary components.
• Experience with large-scale data or search systems such as Elasticsearch, Lucene, Solr, or distributed storage engines, and an understanding of how they work and why they work that way.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
• Collaborating across distributed teams is challenging, we value being supportive, empathetic, and trusting in all interactions, and we expect the same from everyone on the team.

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 familiar with different styles of source control workflow and continuous integration.

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…