Director of Software Engineering - Distributed Systems, Serverless - Elasticsearch

United States Digital Space LLC; United States; Remote; USD 200,000 - 379,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock program

Company 401k with matching

Job summary

Search AI Company is seeking a Director of Software Engineering to lead the Elasticsearch Distributed Systems organization, focusing on scale, performance, and resilience for our Serverless offering. You will guide an ~40-person team of engineers and managers across distributed locations, coordinating with product and other teams to deliver strategic initiatives.

You will mentor engineering leaders, shape architectural trade-offs, and own staffing and planning to sustain a high-performance,

Qualifications

• Experience leading engineering managers and senior technical leaders.
• Hands-on software engineering experience with distributed systems.
• Proven track record delivering large-scale distributed architectures.

Responsibilities

• Develop and execute long-term engineering strategy for Elasticsearch distributed systems.
• Drive performance, scalability, reliability and cost improvements including Serverless support.
• Lead evolution of core distributed architecture: coordination, data allocation, indexing, replication, recovery.
• Provide technical leadership for complex initiatives across multiple teams.

Skills

Leadership of large teams

Distributed systems depth

Architectural decision making

People leadership

Strategic planning

Tools

Elasticsearch

Job description

the company, 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 the company 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 — the company’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 Director of Software Engineering to lead our Elasticsearch Distributed Systems organisation which focuses on how Elasticsearch provides scale, performance, and resilience, especially in the context of our Serverless offering.

As Director of Software Engineering, you will be leading an organisation of approximately 40 engineers and managers to tackle the deep distributed systems challenges that allow Elasticsearch to excel at scale. Your customers are every Elasticsearch user and each solution team which builds upon Elasticsearch.

Our company is distributed by intention. We hire the best engineers we can find wherever they are, whoever they are. As a result, our team is diverse and distributed across continents. We collaborate every day over email, GitHub, Zoom, and Slack. The ability to lead a distributed team is critical.

What You Will Be Doing

• Develop and execute a long-term engineering strategy for Elasticsearch's distributed systems, aligning technical priorities with product direction and business objectives.
• Drive improvements in performance, scalability, reliability and cost efficiency, including foundational capabilities supporting Serverless Elasticsearch.
• Lead the evolution of Elasticsearch's core distributed architecture, including cluster coordination, data allocation, indexing, replication and recovery.
• Provide technical leadership and oversight for complex engineering initiatives and programs, helping engineering managers and technical leaders navigate architectural decisions and competing priorities.
• Own engineering outcomes across your organisation, balancing technical complexity, customer impact, reliability, operational requirements and long-term maintainability.
• Lead, mentor, hire and develop engineering managers and senior technical leaders, establishing high performance standards and building a strong pipeline of future leaders, fostering an inclusive culture of collaboration and technical excellence.
• Take ownership of organisational planning, staffing and resource allocation, ensuring teams have the capabilities and support needed to deliver on strategic priorities.
• Partner with Product Management, engineering leaders and other teams across the company to define priorities and deliver complex initiatives spanning multiple engineering organisations.
• Act as a senior escalation point for critical technical and operational challenges, working closely with engineering, Support and SRE teams to drive effective resolution.
• Communicate engineering strategy, organisational priorities and progress to senior executives, influencing decisions that have a significant impact on the company and its customers.
• Run performance management with consistency (promotions, development plans, and managing underperformance through to resolution) and working with your managers to do the same.

What You Bring

• A proven track record of leading large-scale engineering organisations, including experience managing engineering managers and developing senior technical leaders.
• Previous hands-on software engineering experience, with strong computer science fundamentals and substantial technical depth in distributed systems.
• Extensive experience designing, building or operating complex, large-scale distributed systems, ideally involving database engines, distributed storage or large-scale data processing.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems concepts, including concurrency, consistency, replication, fault tolerance, recovery and performance optimisation.
• Experience establishing engineering strategy, making architectural trade-offs and delivering complex initiatives involving multiple teams and significant technical dependencies.
• A track record of building effective engineering organisations, including organisational planning, senior-level hiring, performance management and leadership development.
• Strong operational experience, with a deep understanding of system reliability, production troubleshooting and the challenges of operating distributed systems at scale.
• Experience partnering with senior engineering and product leaders to establish strategic priorities, allocate resources and deliver meaningful business outcomes.
• The ability to navigate complex organisational challenges, influence senior stakeholders and make informed decisions in situations with significant technical or business consequences.
• A compassionate approach to leadership, with a genuine commitment to coaching, developing and supporting the people you work with.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including experience presenting technical strategy and organisational priorities to senior executives.

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

The typical starting salary range for new hires in this role is listed below. In select locations (including Seattle WA, Los Angeles CA, the San Francisco Bay Area CA, and the New York City Metro Area), an alternate range may apply as specified below.

These ranges represent the lowest to highest salary we reasonably and in good faith believe we would pay for this role at the time of this posting. We may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range, and the ranges may be modified in the future.

An employee's position within the salary range will be based on several factors including, but not limited to, relevant education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, geographic location, performance, and business or organizational needs.

the company believes that employees should have the opportunity to share in the value that we create together for our shareholders. Therefore, in addition to cash compensation, this role is currently eligible to participate in the company's stock program. Our total rewards package also includes a company-matched 401k with dollar-for-dollar matching up to 6% of eligible earnings, along with a range of other benefits offered with a holistic emphasis on employee well-being.

The typical starting salary range for this role is:

$199,700—$315,900 USD

The typical starting salary range for this role in the select locations listed above is:

$239,800—$379,300 USD