Principal AI Engineer - Context - Agents and Context

Elastic; España; Híbrido; EUR 80.000 - 127.000; Jornada completa

Ventajas ofrecidas por este puesto de trabajo

Health coverage

Flexible locations and schedules

Generous vacation days

Volunteer hours

Parental leave

Descripción de la vacante

Elastic, the Search AI Company, invites an experienced Principal AI Engineer to join the Context Engine team. You will own the end-to-end improvement loop for production agents and memory, designing telemetry, evaluation, and safe rollout strategies across public APIs and data models.

This hybrid role collaborates with data scientists, backend engineers, product and UX. You will ship code in TypeScript and Python, contribute to open discussions, and influence customer-facing AI capabilities.

Formación

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, shipping AI-driven products in production.
• Eval-driven product improvement with traces and user feedback.
• Direct experience building agents with state and memory in production.
• Familiarity with MCP, exposing public MCP servers and tools.
• Experience designing telemetry for AI systems to guide decisions.
• End-to-end product experiments: instrumentation and results.
• Builds with public APIs and evolving data models while preserving contracts.
• Strong backend skills in Python or TypeScript for APIs and data pipelines.
• Collaborates well with data scientists, engineers, and product managers.
• Pragmatic, low-ego style for a distributed async team.

Responsabilidades

• Own the production improvement loop for Context Engine and related tools.
• Define safe iteration on agents and skills with versioning and rollout.
• Design telemetry to inform engineering decisions and dashboards.
• Partner with data science for evaluation strategies and quality gates.
• Review designs, mentor engineers, and contribute technical proposals shaping roadmaps.

Conocimientos

Python

TypeScript

Backend engineering

Eval-driven development

Telemetry design

Public APIs

Cross-functional collaboration

Herramientas

MCP

LangGraph

Claude Agent SDK

Elasticsearch

Descripción del empleo

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

The Context Engine team builds the knowledge layer that AI agents use to work with enterprise data in Elasticsearch. We extract knowledge from any data sources into a structured AI Index, serve it to agents through public APIs, MCP tools and framework integrations, and close the loop with agent traces so that what the engine knows improves from real usage. Any agent can use it: Elastic’s own Agent Builder, Claude Code, LangChain and other third-party harnesses.

As a Principal AI Engineer, you own the improvement loop of this product end to end: how agents, automations and skills behave in production, how we observe them, how we evaluate them, and how we ship changes to them safely. This is a hybrid role at the intersection of engineering, data science, and product. You will write production code, design evaluation and telemetry that product decisions can rest on, and set the technical bar for how the team iterates on agentic behaviour. You will work alongside data scientists, backend engineers, product, and UX, and your work will show up directly in what customers build on top of Elastic.

The codebase is TypeScript and we build it in the open, so you'll be shipping code, designs and discussions in public alongside the rest of the Elastic Stack.

What You Will Be Doing

• Own the production improvement loop for Context Engine: understand how extraction automations, retrieval tools and memory behave, based on offline evaluations and customer conversations and telemetry. You help find the failure modes, fix them, and prove the fix.
• Define how we iterate on agents and skills safely: versioning and rollout of prompts, skills and automations, regression coverage, staged and shadow evaluation, and the guardrails that let us change behaviour without breaking customers.
• Design the telemetry we need to make data-informed engineering decisions: what to capture from agent traces, tool calls and knowledge retrieval, how it lands in Elasticsearch, and how it feeds evaluation, dashboards and the feedback loop.
• Partner with the data science team on evaluation strategy: golden datasets, evaluators to gate on quality, latency and cost.
• Raise the bar across the team: review designs and PRs, mentor engineers in eval-driven development, and write the technical proposals that shape the roadmap.

What You Bring

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with the recent years spent shipping and operating AI-driven products on real production traffic, ideally products with public APIs and data models that had to evolve without breaking customers.
• A track record of eval-driven product improvement: you have diagnosed agent or LLM behaviour from traces and user feedback, designed the evaluation that exposed the problem, shipped the fix and measured the outcome.
• Direct experience building agents with state and memory, and iterating on prompts, skills and tool behaviour safely in production.
• Familiarity with MCP, including exposing public MCP servers and tools.
• Experience designing telemetry for AI systems, and using it to make engineering and product decisions.
• Experience running product experiments end to end: instrumentation, unattended execution, and interpreting results.
• Experience building products with public APIs and evolving data models, and the judgement that comes with maintaining external contracts as a product changes.
• Strong backend engineering skills in either Python or TypeScript: APIs, stateful workflows, data pipelines and production services.
• Comfort working with data scientists, engineers, and product managers as peers, translating between measurement and shipping, and communicating trade-offs clearly.
• A pragmatic, low-ego style suited to a distributed, async-first team.

Bonus Points

• Experience with agent frameworks such as LangGraph, CrewAI, Claude Agent SDK, or similar.
• Agentic retrieval experience, including knowledge representation.
• Practical Elasticsearch experience.

Compensation for this role is in the form of base salary. This role does not have a variable compensation component.

At Elastic, our compensation philosophy aims to provide fair, competitive and transparent remuneration. Salary ranges are established based on a combination of external market benchmarks, internal pay equity considerations, and the responsibilities and complexity associated with each role. This approach helps ensure consistency across comparable roles while remaining competitive within the relevant labour markets.

The typical starting salary range for this role is: €80.400 — €127.200 EUR

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 minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave

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.

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