Principal Software Engineer, Search Infrastructure

Elastic; Greater London; Remote; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage for family

Flexible location

Generous vacation days

Parental leave

Volunteer time off

Charitable matching

Job summary

Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch, is seeking a Principal Software Engineer for the Elasticsearch - Search Infra team. You will define, direct, and build the next generation of Elasticsearch capabilities, focusing on indexing, retrieval, and relevance while collaborating across teams.

Bring deep expertise in search internals, guide the roadmap, mentor engineers, and drive high-performance systems at scale.

Qualifications

• Proven leadership on technical projects in search infrastructure.
• Deep expertise in Elasticsearch/Lucene-like ecosystems.
• Mentor engineers and guide technical direction across teams.

Responsibilities

• Define and lead the evolution of core search and indexing capabilities.
• Research advances in search infrastructure and data structures.
• Shape long-term technical vision for Elasticsearch core search and retrieval.
• Collaborate with product teams and partners to align roadmaps.

Skills

Java

Search infra

Distributed systems

Mentoring

Cross-team collaboration

Open source

Data structures

Concurrency

Tools

Elasticsearch

Lucene

Solr

Git

CI/CD

Job description

Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch, is seeking a Principal Software Engineer for the Elasticsearch - Search Infra team. You will define, direct, and build the next generation of Elasticsearch capabilities, focusing on indexing, retrieval, and relevance while collaborating across teams.

Bring deep expertise in search internals, guide the roadmap, mentor engineers, and drive high-performance systems at scale.