Senior Java Software Engineer - Search Inference - Platform

Elasticsearch B.V.; Ireland; On-site; EUR 87,000 - 138,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage for you and family

Flexible locations and schedules

Generous vacation days

Volunteer time (40 hours/year)

Parental leave (16 weeks)

Job summary

Elastic, the Search AI Company, is seeking a Senior Java Developer to join the Elasticsearch team and drive work on the Inference API in Elasticsearch. The Elasticsearch Inference API connects Elasticsearch with ML services and powers features like semantic search and generative AI across Elastic Cloud.

You will maintain the plugin framework and REST API, collaborating with the wider inference and Kibana teams.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of production Java experience in a large codebase.
• Experience crafting ergonomic APIs and reasoning through trade-offs.
• Strong knowledge of Java concurrency and low-level internals.
• Proven track record of using AI to accelerate development and debugging.
• Ability to collaborate across teams and work autonomously.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain integrations with internal systems and external inference providers, including schema negotiation and streaming.
• Contribute to the inference plugin architecture: task settings, chunking, rate limiting, and provider config.
• Review open source contributions and ensure code quality meets standards.
• Participate in on-call rotation for inference incidents.
• Write thorough tests: ESTestCase unit tests, YAML REST tests, and rolling-upgrade tests.

Skills

Production Java

API design

Java concurrency

AI in development

Cross-team collaboration

Autonomous work

Tools

Gradle

Job description

Elastic, the Search AI Company, enables everyone to find the answers they need in real time, using all their data, at scale — unleashing the potential of businesses and people. The Elastic Search AI Platform, used by more than 50% of the Fortune 500, brings together the precision of search and the intelligence of AI to enable everyone to accelerate the results that matter. By taking advantage of all structured and unstructured data — securing and protecting private information more effectively — Elastic’s complete, cloud-based solutions for search, security, and observability help organizations deliver on the promise of AI.

What is The Role:

We are on the lookout for a Senior Java Developer to join our Elasticsearch team and drive our work on the Inference API in Elasticsearch.

The Elasticsearch Inference API is the integration layer between Elasticsearch and external machine learning services including Elastic's own Elastic Inference Service (EIS), third-party providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, Cohere, Google), and self-hosted models. It powers features like semantic search, reranking, and generative AI across Elastic Cloud and in hosted environments.

You'll maintain and develop the plugin framework and REST API with your work spanning protocol design, streaming, async execution, billing integration, and with a tight collaboration with the wider inference team and the Kibana team.

What You Will Be Doing:

• Build and maintain integrations with internal systems and external inference providers, including schema negotiation, streaming (SSE), and error normalization
• Contribute to the inference plugin's internal architecture: task settings, chunking strategies, rate limiting, and provider-level configuration
• Review open source contributions to the codebase and work with third party engineers to ensure their contributions meet our technology standards
• Participate in on-call rotation for inference-related incidents
• Write thorough tests: unit tests using ESTestCase, YAML-based REST integration tests, and rolling-upgrade tests

What You Bring:

• 5+ years of production Java experience, with experience contributing to a large, established Java codebase. You know core Java and are conversant in the standard library of data structures and concurrency constructs, as well as newer language features.
• Experience crafting ergonomic APIs and the ability to reason through trade-offs.
• Experience with low-level Java such as concurrency, parallelism, classloaders, etc.
• You have a proven track record of using AI to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimize code, while still owning the final outcomes.
• You possess the ability to collaborate across functions and teams and seamlessly transition between different projects, codebases, or teams based on business priorities.
• You can work autonomously, drive decisions and results in a distributed team by leveraging asynchronous, direct, and transparent communication.

Bonus Points:

• Knowledge of JDK internals: modules, the Java memory model, garbage collection, database load, caching techniques, etc.
• Experience with ML systems
• Contributions to and ownership of open source projects
• Knowledge of Java build tools (Gradle, Maven, etc.), with a strong preference for Gradle experience.
• Experience working in a platform team or developer productivity team

Additional Information - We Take Care of Our People:

As a distributed company, diversity drives our identity. Whether you’re looking to launch a new career or grow an existing one, Elastic is the type of company where you can balance great work with great life. Your age is only a number. It doesn’t matter if you’re just out of college or your children are; we need you for what you can do.

We strive to have parity of benefits across regions, and while regulations differ from place to place, we believe taking care of our people is the right thing to do.

• Competitive pay based on the work you do here and not your previous salary
• Health coverage for you and your family in many locations
• Ability to craft your calendar with flexible locations and schedules for many roles
• Generous number of vacation days each year
• Increase your impact - We match up to $2000 (or local currency equivalent) for financial donations and service
• Up to 40 hours each year to use toward volunteer projects you love
• Embracing parenthood with a minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave

Security & Privacy Responsibilities: Take ownership of protecting the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of organizational data and systems by following applicable privacy and security policies, standards, and procedures. Ensure that all individual contributions follow Elastic’s Secure Software Development Framework (SSDF). Proactively participate in mandatory role-based training to ensure personal technical execution consistently aligns with the highest standards of data protection, data privacy, and system resilience.

Different people approach problems differently. We need that. Elastic is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to creating an inclusive culture that celebrates different perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, ethnicity, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, disability status, or any other basis protected by federal, state or local law, ordinance or regulation.

We welcome individuals with disabilities and strive to create an accessible and inclusive experience for all individuals.

Applicants have rights under Federal Employment Laws and can view the following posters linked below:

Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) Poster

Employee Polygraph Protection Act (EPPA) Poster

Please see here for our Privacy Statement.

Elasticsearch develops and distributes technology and information that is subject to U.S. and other countries’ export controls and licensing requirements for individuals who are located in or are nationals of the following sanctioned countries and regions: Belarus, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, or Russia, including the Ukrainian territories annexed by Russia (The Crimea region of Ukraine, The Donetsk People's Republic (DNR), The Luhansk People's Republic (LNR), Kherson or Zaporizhzhia). If you are located in or are a national of one of the listed countries or regions, an export license may be required as a condition of your employment in this role. Please note that national origin and/or nationality do not affect eligibility for employment with Elastic.

Please see here for our Privacy Statement.

Compensation for this role is in the form of base salary. This role does not have a variable compensation component.

At Elastic, our compensation philosophy aims to provide fair, competitive and transparent remuneration. Salary ranges are established based on a combination of external market benchmarks, internal pay equity considerations, and the responsibilities and complexity associated with each role. This approach helps ensure consistency across comparable roles while remaining competitive within the relevant labour markets.

The typical starting salary range for this role is:

€87.300—€138.100 EUR