Lead Performance Engineer, Large-Scale Search Platform

Elasticsearch B.V.; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 160,000 - 253,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage

Flexible location & schedules

Vacation days

Volunteer time

Parental leave

Job summary

Elastic is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead performance engineering for Elasticsearch. You will own cross-team performance initiatives, architect scalable optimizations, and develop models for complex distributed systems.

The role emphasizes profiling, regression detection, and AI-assisted benchmarking to ensure high performance across diverse environments. You will mentor engineers, collaborate with multiple teams, and influence feature design with a performance-first mindset.

Qualifications

• Deep knowledge of Java internals and JVM memory management.
• Experience profiling and optimizing distributed systems with benchmarking tools.

Responsibilities

• Own performance initiatives from architecture to production, delivering high-impact optimizations.
• Develop performance models and methodologies for complex distributed systems.
• Drive optimization 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 benchmarks and regression detection for stateful and serverless architectures.
• Collaborate across teams to embed performance-first thinking in new features.
• Design and build AI-assisted optimization harnesses for profiling and benchmarking.
• Mentor engineers and promote performance-focused development.

Skills

Java internals

JVM memory management

Concurrency models

High-performance code

Distributed systems profiling

AI tooling integration

Tools

Flamegraphs

JMH

Rally

Job description

Elastic is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead performance engineering for Elasticsearch. You will own cross-team performance initiatives, architect scalable optimizations, and develop models for complex distributed systems.

The role emphasizes profiling, regression detection, and AI-assisted benchmarking to ensure high performance across diverse environments. You will mentor engineers, collaborate with multiple teams, and influence feature design with a performance-first mindset.