Principal Performance Engineer: Distributed Search Platform

Elastic; Polska; On-site; PLN 369,000 - 584,000; Full time

Job summary

Elastic, the Search AI Company, is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to join the Elasticsearch Performance team. You will lead architectural and code-level performance initiatives across distributed systems to keep Elasticsearch fast, scalable, and reliable.

You will own design and optimization efforts from architecture to production, mentor engineers, and collaborate across teams to embed performance-first thinking. This is a high-impact, technical leadership role.

Qualifications

• Deep knowledge of Java internals and JVM memory management.
• Experience profiling and optimizing distributed systems.
• Strong understanding of concurrency models and thread-safety.
• Experience with benchmarking tools and AI-assisted optimization.

Responsibilities

• Own core performance initiatives from architecture to production.
• Lead design and execution for major performance improvements.
• Develop performance models for distributed systems.
• Drive optimization for RAM, CPU, and storage in diverse environments.
• Profile system behavior to identify bottlenecks in logging and vector search.
• Ensure robust benchmarks and regression detection for serverless and stateful architectures.
• Embed performance thinking into new features and automate profiling workflows.
• Mentor engineers and foster performance-aware development.

Skills

Java internals

JVM memory management

Concurrency models

High-performance code

Profiling tools

Distributed systems

AI-assisted optimization

Tools

flamegraphs

JMH

Rally

Benchmarking

Job description

Elastic, the Search AI Company, is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to join the Elasticsearch Performance team. You will lead architectural and code-level performance initiatives across distributed systems to keep Elasticsearch fast, scalable, and reliable.

You will own design and optimization efforts from architecture to production, mentor engineers, and collaborate across teams to embed performance-first thinking. This is a high-impact, technical leadership role.