Principal Performance Engineer, Distributed Systems

Elastic; Ireland; Hybrid; EUR 105,000 - 166,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage for you & family

Flexible locations & schedules

Generous vacation days

Donation matching up to €2,000

Volunteer hours (40 per year)

Job summary

Elastic seeks a Principal Software Engineer for the Elasticsearch Performance team. You will lead architectural and code-level performance initiatives to optimize Elasticsearch across distributed systems, partnering with area teams to unlock full software potential.

You will mentor engineers, drive AI-assisted optimization, and embed performance thinking into new features from the outset, ensuring scalability and predictability in diverse environments.

Qualifications

• Deep knowledge of Java internals and JVM memory management; understanding concurrency models; write high-performance, thread-safe, lock-free code.
• Proven profiling/optimizing distributed systems; experience with benchmarking tools (Flamegraphs, JMH, Rally) and optimization approaches.
• Solid grasp of distributed systems: partition tolerance, cluster state propagation, scaling large data stores.
• Experience using AI/advanced tooling to accelerate optimization and automate benchmarking workflows.
• Ability to collaborate across functions and drive performance engineering as a distributed team.

Responsibilities

• Own core performance initiatives from architecture to production; lead design and execution for major improvements.
• Develop performance models and methodologies for complex distributed systems.
• Drive optimization strategies to keep Elasticsearch performant, predictable, and scalable.
• Profile/system behavior to identify bottlenecks in logging, metrics, vector search, and ES|QL.
• Ensure robust benchmarks and regression detection for stateful and Serverless architectures.
• Embed performance-first thinking into new features from the outset.
• Drive automation by building AI-assisted optimization harnesses for profiling and benchmarking.
• Mentor engineers to foster excellence and performance-aware development.

Skills

Java internals & JVM memory management

Profiling & optimization ofDistributed

Distributed systems architecture

AI-assisted optimization & automation

Cross-functional collaboration & async

Tools

Flamegraphs

JMH

Rally

Job description

Elastic seeks a Principal Software Engineer for the Elasticsearch Performance team. You will lead architectural and code-level performance initiatives to optimize Elasticsearch across distributed systems, partnering with area teams to unlock full software potential.

You will mentor engineers, drive AI-assisted optimization, and embed performance thinking into new features from the outset, ensuring scalability and predictability in diverse environments.