Principal Engineer, Elasticsearch Search Infra — Remote

Elastic; Madrid; Hybrid; EUR 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Fully paid health coverage for you and

Flexible location and schedule

Generous vacation days

16 weeks parental leave

40 hours volunteering per year

Charitable giving match up to 1500 USD

Job summary

Elastic is hiring a Principal Software Engineer to shape the next generation of Elasticsearch capabilities. You will define technical direction for core search infrastructure, including indexing, retrieval, and relevance, collaborating across teams to deliver scalable solutions.

You’ll work with partners and product teams to translate needs into an innovative roadmap, mentor engineers, and lead end-to-end projects from concept to completion in a distributed, globally distributed team.

Qualifications

• Experience defining a long-term technical vision for core search infrastructure.
• Excellent verbal and written communication across distributed teams.
• Experience with large-scale search systems: Elasticsearch, Lucene, or Solr.
• Hands-on with search and indexing tech (Elasticsearch, Lucene, Solr).
• Autonomy to lead projects end-to-end with cross-team collaboration.
• Proven experience leading technical projects in search infrastructure.
• Mentoring expert engineers and providing guidance.
• Strong core Java skills and familiarity with data structures and concurrency.
• Experience with open source projects and CI workflows.
• Previous Elasticsearch experience and knowledge of IR theory.

Responsibilities

• Define, lead, and contribute to the evolution of core search and indexing capabilities.
• Search infrastructure research: data structures and retrieval algorithms.
• Collaborate with partners and product teams to shape long-term technical vision.
• Drive roadmap for Elasticsearch’s indexing, query execution, and relevance.
• Be the go-to expert in Elasticsearch domains and share insights.

Skills

Technical vision

Communication

Large-scale search

Elasticsearch/Lucene

Autonomy

Project leadership

Mentoring

Java

Open source

IR theory

Tools

Elasticsearch

Lucene

Solr

Job description

Elastic is hiring a Principal Software Engineer to shape the next generation of Elasticsearch capabilities. You will define technical direction for core search infrastructure, including indexing, retrieval, and relevance, collaborating across teams to deliver scalable solutions.

You’ll work with partners and product teams to translate needs into an innovative roadmap, mentor engineers, and lead end-to-end projects from concept to completion in a distributed, globally distributed team.