Principal Performance Engineer: Elasticsearch

Borderless; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 67,000 - 106,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage

Flexible schedules

Generous vacation days

Donation matching

Volunteer hours

Parental leave

Job summary

Elastic, the Search AI Company, is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to join the Elasticsearch Performance team. You will lead architectural and code-level performance initiatives, driving optimizations and benchmarking across distributed systems.

Requirements include deep Java internals knowledge, JVM memory management, and experience with profiling tools, JMH, and Rally. The role emphasizes collaboration, autonomous work, and AI-assisted optimization to maintain scalable performance.

Qualifications

• Deep knowledge of Java internals and JVM memory management.
• Experience profiling and optimizing distributed systems with benchmarking tools.
• Understanding distributed systems architecture and scaling challenges.
• Proven track record using AI/advanced tooling to accelerate optimization.
• Ability to collaborate across functions and teams.
• Autonomous, asynchronous, and transparent communication.

Responsibilities

• Owning core performance initiatives from architecture to production with high-impact optimizations.
• Developing performance models and methodologies for distributed systems.
• Driving optimization to keep Elasticsearch performant and scalable.
• Profiling systems to identify bottlenecks in logging, metrics, and vector search.
• Ensuring robust benchmarks and regression detection for stateful/stateless systems.
• Collaborating across the company to embed performance-first thinking in new features.
• Designing AI-assisted optimization harnesses to streamline profiling and benchmarking.
• Mentoring engineers and promoting performance-focused development.

Skills

Java internals

JVM memory management

Concurrency models

High-performance coding

Profiling tools

Distributed systems

AI-assisted optimization

Cross-functional collaboration

Asynchronous communication

Benchmarking (JMH/Rally)

Tools

Flamegraphs

JMH

Rally

Job description

Elastic, the Search AI Company, is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to join the Elasticsearch Performance team. You will lead architectural and code-level performance initiatives, driving optimizations and benchmarking across distributed systems.

Requirements include deep Java internals knowledge, JVM memory management, and experience with profiling tools, JMH, and Rally. The role emphasizes collaboration, autonomous work, and AI-assisted optimization to maintain scalable performance.