Senior Benchmarking Engineer – Performance & Competition

Elastic; United Kingdom; On-site; GBP 100,000 - 158,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage for you and yourFamily

Flexible locations and schedules

Generous vacation days

Volunteer time off (up to 40 hours)

Parental leave (16 weeks)

Job summary

Elastic, the Search AI Company, is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to lead competitive benchmarking within the Elasticsearch Performance team. You will develop workloads, automate experiments, and compare Elasticsearch with alternative systems to reveal performance strengths and tradeoffs.

This hands-on role involves building benchmarks, analyzing latency and throughput, and publishing clear technical reports.

Qualifications

• Experience building maintainable automation and analysis tools in Python or similar.
• Hands-on experience evaluating performance in distributed systems, databases, or search infrastructure.
• Depth in search, vector retrieval, analytical databases, or observability systems.
• Experience designing representative datasets and workloads, including concurrency and ingestion behavior.
• Strong experimental judgment and understanding of measurement noise.
• Ability to document configurations, procedures, and results for reproducibility.
• Clear technical writing and communication skills to explain findings.
• Ability to collaborate to translate performance evidence into engineering recommendations.

Responsibilities

• Own prioritized benchmarking initiatives across search, vector, and hybrid retrieval.
• Build and maintain automated benchmark harnesses reflecting real-world usage.
• Design fair comparisons with documented versions, configs, budgets, and differences.
• Evaluate latency, throughput, resource use, and cost efficiency.
• Adapt tools like Rally, ClickBench, and vector benchmarks to workloads.
• Investigate performance differences using profiling and experiments; collaborate with teams.
• Evaluate self-managed and managed cloud deployments, including serverless options.
• Publish reproducible benchmark artifacts and clear technical reports.
• Partner with engineering and product management to prioritize benchmarks.

Skills

Python

Distributed systems

Benchmarking

Data analysis

Technical writing

Collaboration

Tools

Elasticsearch Rally

ClickBench

Vector benchmark frameworks

Job description

Elastic, the Search AI Company, is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to lead competitive benchmarking within the Elasticsearch Performance team. You will develop workloads, automate experiments, and compare Elasticsearch with alternative systems to reveal performance strengths and tradeoffs.

This hands-on role involves building benchmarks, analyzing latency and throughput, and publishing clear technical reports.