Principal Software Engineer, Search Infrastructure (Lucene)

Elasticsearch B.V.; United Kingdom; Remote; GBP 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage

Flexible scheduling

Generous vacation

Donation matching

Volunteer hours

Parental leave

Job summary

Elastic, the Search AI Company, is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to join the Elasticsearch - Search Infra team. You will define, lead, and contribute to core search and indexing capabilities in a globally distributed environment.

You will mentor engineers, shape a long-term technical vision, and collaborate with product teams to build fast, scalable search foundations using Elasticsearch, Lucene, and Solr.

Qualifications

• Experience leading technical projects in the search infrastructure and distributed systems space.
• 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.
• 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.

Responsibilities

• Lead the evolution of core search and indexing capabilities.
• Research advances in search infrastructure, data structures, and retrieval algorithms.
• Collaborate with partners and product teams to shape the 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 multiple domains and continuously improve them through insights.

Skills

Search infrastructure

Distributed systems

Mentoring engineers

Technical vision

Elasticsearch/Lucene/Solr

Java

Data structures

Concurrency

Autonomy

Open source

Tools

Elasticsearch

Lucene

Solr

Java

Git/GitHub

Job description

Elastic, the Search AI Company, is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to join the Elasticsearch - Search Infra team. You will define, lead, and contribute to core search and indexing capabilities in a globally distributed environment.

You will mentor engineers, shape a long-term technical vision, and collaborate with product teams to build fast, scalable search foundations using Elasticsearch, Lucene, and Solr.