Director of IT Software Engineering

Elastic; United States; On-site; USD 260,000 - 380,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage for you and family

Flexible location and schedule

Vacation days and parental leave

Job summary

Elastic seeks a Director, IT Engineering to lead a small, agile team focused on replacing high-priority internal SaaS with Elastic-native platforms. You will own architectural oversight, delivery plans, and drive engineering rigor while enabling rapid execution.

You will collaborate with IT, Finance, Security, and Platform Engineering to optimize the internal SaaS portfolio, setting standards and guiding build-vs-buy decisions across multiple cost centers.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of software engineering experience
• Experience managing or leading direct engineering reports or small engineering teams
• Strong written communication to author architecture decision records and proposals
• Hands-on familiarity with Elasticsearch: data modeling, queries, performance tuning, production operations
• Proven track record of building and shipping commercial software or platform systems

Responsibilities

• Lead a small, agile engineering team delivering internal platform replacements on the Elastic Stack
• Own architectural oversight, build plan, and delivery of high-priority IT initiatives
• Collaborate with IT leadership, Finance, Security, Platform Engineering to optimize the internal SaaS portfolio
• Guide build-vs-buy analyses and promote cost-effective, Elastic-native solutions
• Set engineering standards and practices for IT platform engineering
• Mentor engineers and drive internal developer experience and productivity tooling
• Ensure systems are reference architectures feeding Elastic's product and go-to-market strategy

Skills

Elasticsearch

Engineering leadership

Architecture design

FinOps

LLM integration

React frontend

Kibana

Cloud cost management

Tools

Elastic Stack

Job description

• We are looking for a Director, IT Engineering to join our Information Technology team to lead this effort. This is not a passive IT management role or a SaaS administration leadership position. It is a high-impact engineering leadership role where you will manage a small, agile team of engineers who look at $500,000 annual SaaS contracts, ask: ‘Could we build a better version of this on Elasticsearch in twelve weeks?’ — and execute
• This is a rare opportunity to lead original product engineering inside an IT organization, working with a platform that most engineers only get to use as a customer — and to build systems that directly shape how a public company operates
• Lead strategic build-vs-buy engineering
• Work with IT leadership, Finance, and Engineering to evaluate Elastic’s internal SaaS portfolio and identify where custom-built systems — backed by Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Elastic’s AI capabilities — deliver better value than continued vendor contracts
• Own the architectural oversight, build plan, and overall delivery of the highest-priority replacements
• Lead a high-performing engineering team
• Build, mentor, and lead a small, focused team of software engineers executing on internal tool replacements and Elastic-native platforms
• Manage delivery roadmaps, unblock your team, and balance engineering rigor with rapid execution speed
• Design & build Elastic-native internal Platforms: Guide your team in designing and delivering systems across five primary focus areas:
• Platform productivity tools: Internal developer portals, knowledge search layers, engineering onboarding systems, and workspace tooling that unifies disparate SaaS tools into a single Elasticsearch-backed search and intelligence layer
• FinOps and AI cost governance: A consolidated cost visibility and anomaly detection system across Elastic’s AI providers (Anthropic, OpenAI Codex, GitHub Copilot, Google Gemini) and cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), replacing commercial FinOps SaaS with an Elastic ML-powered alternative
• IT service management: Evaluating and building replacements for commercially purchased SaaS products including incident management, knowledge base search, internal developer portal, and SIEM-correlated security workflows, using Elastic Observability and Elastic Security as the backbone
• Enterprise efficiency systems: Custom tooling that reduces manual process overhead across IT, Finance, HR, Legal and Operations, using the LLM Gateway, RAG pipelines, and Elasticsearch as the data and intelligence layer
• New use cases: New use cases that traditionally SaaS paid services did not address and can now be built with AI native architecture
• Set the engineering standard
• Establish and own the architectural standards, design patterns, and engineering practices for all IT platform engineering work
• Define how internal systems are built — data models, API design, observability, cost governance, security posture — and serve as the engineering authority for your team
• Collaborate across the company
• Partner closely with Elastic’s IT infrastructure team, the Security organization (Elastic Security is your SIEM backbone), the Platform Engineering team, and Finance
• Engage with tool owners across the company to understand requirements, challenge assumptions about what needs to be bought versus built, and ensure that the systems your team builds actually get used
• Dogfood and validate Elastic’s own products
• Run Elastic’s own technology in the most demanding possible context: as the engineering leader responsible for the internal systems that the company depends on every day
• Every system your team builds is a reference architecture. Ensure that insights generated about what works and what doesn’t feed directly into Elastic’s product and go-to-market strategy

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).

12+ years of software engineering experience, including experience managing or leading direct engineering reports or small engineering teamsStrong written communication to author architecture decision records, engineering standards documents, executive proposals, and build-vs-buy analysesProven track record of building, shipping, and managing commercial software or platform systems — not just maintaining existing onesHands-on familiarity and technical capability with Elasticsearch — data modeling, query design, aggregations, performance tuning, and production operationsProven track record of guiding full-stack engineering delivery end-to-end, from Logstash ingest pipelines to Kibana dashboards to React frontendsArchitectural judgment: the ability to scope a problem correctly, choose the right components, and make executive calls on when to build versus integrate versus buyExperience leading teams that build on the Elastic Stack beyond basic logging — Elastic ML, ELSER semantic search, vector search, Kibana Canvas, Watcher, or Elastic SecurityExperience with FinOps practices: cloud cost management, LLM API cost attribution, or building cost visibility toolingFamiliarity with Information Technology managed systems — understanding the core domain problems solved by platforms like Salesforce or ServiceNowExperience with LLM integration patterns: RAG pipelines, prompt engineering for enterprise use cases, LLM gateway design, or AI-powered workflow automationExperience working in a hypergrowth or post-IPO technology company where engineering rigor and business speed have to coexistContributions to internal developer experience, platform engineering, or engineering productivity tooling