Senior Java Engineer (Core / Infra - Elasticsearch)

Elastic; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 110,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage

Flexible location

Generous vacation

Parental leave

Volunteer time

Charitable match

Job summary

Elastic is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for the Elasticsearch team to build foundational infrastructure and shared functionality. You will drive low-level design, ensure performance, security, and maintainability, and collaborate across teams.

You will work on serverless orchestration, CI/CD workflows, and enabling Elasticsearch across cloud, serverless, and on‑premise environments. Strong Java and system design skills are essential.

Qualifications

• Experience with low-level Java concurrency and memory models.
• Hands-on with CI/CD systems and practices (Buildkite, Argo CD, GitOps).
• Proficient in algorithms and data structures.
• Ability to design APIs and reason through tradeoffs.
• Experience crafting software for scalable platform teams.
• Ability to work autonomously in distributed teams and communicate clearly.

Responsibilities

• Own foundational infrastructure and shared functionality for Elasticsearch.
• Design and implement horizontally-scalable features and APIs.
• Improve operation and observability of cloud systems, including OpenTelemetry.
• Lead cross-team projects and communicate technical concepts across collaborators.
• Resolve performance or concurrency issues and propose robust solutions.
• Collaborate with Elastic users and open source projects.

Skills

Concurrency

APIs design

Distributed systems

Asynchronous communication

AI acceleration

Data structures

JDK internals

Tools

Buildkite

Argo CD

GitOps

OpenTelemetry

Go

Kubernetes

Gradle

Maven

Job description

• We are on the lookout for a Senior Software Engineer to join our Elasticsearch team and focus on ensuring that the shared platform functionalities of Elasticsearch are easy to use, performant, maintainable, and secure
• The team’s mission is to create foundational infrastructure and shared functionality that enables engineers to develop, extend, and support Elasticsearch
• The team owns common functionality such as services, settings, and scripting, and makes Elasticsearch extensible through plugins or the Painless scripting language
• The team also makes Elasticsearch observable by providing logging and telemetry information
• We also own the orchestration of Elasticsearch in serverless, the CI/CD workflows, and enable Elasticsearch developers to deliver Elasticsearch to customers - serverless, cloud, and on-premise alike
• You will be a strong individual contributor on the team, but you will also contribute to and lead cross-team projects
• We need someone who has great design skills, who can work at a low level of abstraction but can equally drive and communicate technical concepts across a variety of collaborators
• Contributing to large, impactful projects that evolve the core infrastructure that underpins Elasticsearch
• Making Elasticsearch developers more productive by identifying and developing opportunities for automation, and integrating agentic apps into development workflows
• Designing and implementing new horizontally-scalable features and APIs in Elasticsearch
• Solving difficult issues, including performance or concurrency issues, and proposing solutions
• Improving operation and observability of Elasticsearch cloud systems
• Collaborating in the open with the ES team, Elastic users, and other supporting open source projects
• Supporting our support engineers with the harder problems
• Owning operational investigations end-to-end, until performance or stability issues are successfully resolved

Benefits

• Toast to your health: Fully paid health coverage for you and your family, in many locations.
• Craft your calendar: Flexible location and schedule for most roles.
• Create space for you: Distributed by design workforce, plus generous number of vacation days each year.
• Embrace parenthood: Minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave, plus generous family formation benefits.
• Give back your time: 40 hours each year to use toward volunteering with organizations and causes you’re passionate about.
• Amplify your impact: Double your charitable giving — we match donations up to $1500 USD (or local currency equivalent).

Willingness to dive into new issues and ask for help when you need itExperience with low-level Java such as concurrency, parallelism, classloaders, etcHands-on experience with CI/CD systems and practices (Buildkite, Argo CD, GitOps etc)Proficient in algorithms and data structuresYou possess the ability to collaborate across functions and teams and seamlessly transition between different projects, codebases, or teams based on business prioritiesYou have a proven track record of using AI to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimize code, while still owning the final outcomesExperience crafting APIs and the ability to reason through tradeoffsYou can work autonomously, drive decisions and results in a distributed team by leveraging asynchronous, direct, and transparent communicationYou have strong skills in core Java and are conversant in the standard library of data structures and concurrency constructs, as well as newer language featuresExperience leading large scale projects across engineering teamsYou are able to own projects from beginning to end. This covers both technical design and working with others to develop needed componentsKnowledge of JDK internals: modules, the Java memory model, garbage collection, database load, caching techniques, etcExperience with observability and telemetry solutions, particularly OpenTelemetryKnowledge of GoKnowledge of containers and KubernetesKnowledge of Java build tools (Gradle, Maven, etc), with a strong preference for Gradle experienceExperience working in a platform team or developer productivity team