Senior Software Engineer - Performance Tuning - Elasticsearch

Elastic; Ireland; On-site; EUR 87,000 - 138,000; Full time

Job summary

Elastic, the Search AI Company, is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join the Elasticsearch Performance team. You will contribute to performance engineering initiatives and work across distributed systems to optimize latency and throughput.

You will profile, benchmark, and implement high-performance, thread-safe code in Java, with a focus on JVM memory, concurrency, and AI-assisted optimization. This is a fully remote, distributed role with competitive EUR salary range €87,300–€138,100.

Qualifications

• Strong knowledge of Java and the JVM.
• Experience profiling and optimizing distributed systems.
• Experience with benchmarking and performance regression detection.
• Experience using AI-assisted tooling to accelerate optimization.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to core performance engineering initiatives from development to production, focusing on impactful optimizations.
• Execute technical designs and plans for architectural and code-level performance improvements.
• Implement foundational performance models for complex distributed systems.
• Support optimization strategies to keep Elasticsearch performant, predictable, and scalable.
• Profile and analyze system behavior to identify bottlenecks in logging, metrics, vector search, and ES|QL.
• Ensure robust performance benchmarks and regression detection for stateful and serverless architectures.
• Collaborate with peers to apply performance-focused practices to new features.
• Contribute to automation efforts by building AI-assisted optimization harnesses for profiling and benchmarking.

Skills

Java internals

JVM memory management

Concurrency models

Profiling distributed systems

Benchmarking tools

AI-assisted optimization

Tools

JMH

Rally

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

Elasticsearch powers search, observability, and AI retrieval (RAG) for the world's largest organizations. We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join the Elasticsearch Performance team. In this role, you will contribute to performance engineering initiatives through high-quality code and technical analysis. Your goal is to help improve the optimization and predictability of Elasticsearch performance, collaborating with area-specific teams to enhance our software.

What You Will Be Doing

• Contributing to core performance engineering initiatives from development to production, focusing on the delivery of impactful optimizations.
• Executing technical designs and plans for architectural and code-level performance improvements.
• Implementing foundational performance models and methodologies for complex, distributed systems.
• Supporting optimization strategies to ensure Elasticsearch remains performant, predictable, and scalable in diverse environments.
• Profiling and analyzing system behavior to identify bottlenecks in logging, metrics, vector search, and ES|QL.
• Ensuring robust performance benchmarks and regression detection for both stateful and stateless (Serverless) architectures.
• Collaborating with peers across the team to apply performance-focused development practices into new features.
• Contributing to automation efforts by building AI-assisted optimization harnesses that streamline profiling, hypothesis testing, and benchmarking.
• Providing technical guidance and peer reviews to other engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence.

What You Bring

• You have deep knowledge of Java internals and JVM memory management.
• You understand how concurrency models work.
• You can write code that is high-performance, thread-safe, and lock-free.
• This experience includes working with large open-source and enterprise codebases.
• You have proven experience in profiling and optimizing distributed systems.
• This includes deep experience with benchmarking tools (e.g., JMH, Rally), identifying performance regressions, and implementing algorithmic or hardware-aware optimizations.
• You have a solid comprehension of distributed systems architecture, including partition tolerance, cluster state propagation, and scaling challenges in large-scale data stores.
• You have a proven track record of using AI or advanced tooling to accelerate optimization, debug complex performance issues, and automate benchmarking workflows.
• You possess the ability to collaborate effectively within a team environment, contributing to the success of performance engineering goals.
• 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 result in a distributed team by leveraging asynchronous, direct, and transparent communication.

Bonus Points

• Experience integrating high-performance native libraries (e.g., C++, Rust, SIMD-accelerated code) into Java applications.
• Deep knowledge of modern storage engine performance, index modes, or vector search optimizations.
• Experience defining and managing Performance SLAs and success criteria for distributed systems.
• Experience working on the internals of a large-scale data store or search engine.
• Experience working on the internals of a data store or search engine.
• Experience working on the internals of a data store or search engine.

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

Additional Information - We Take Care of Our People

As a distributed company, diversity…