Principal Java Engineer - Distributed Systems, Serverless - Elasticsearch

Referral Board; Town of Greece (NY); On-site; USD 182,689 - 274,034; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive pay

Health coverage

Flexible locations

Generous vacation

Donations matching

Volunteer hours

Parental leave

Job summary

Elastic seeks a Principal Java Engineer to join the Elasticsearch - Distributed Systems team, focusing on scale, performance, and resilience in our Serverless offering. You will tackle deep distributed systems challenges across nodes, indexing, and data movement in a global customer base.

You will own end-to-end design and implementation, collaborate across teams, and push the boundaries of shards, nodes, and petabytes while maintaining safety and liveness of the system.

Qualifications

• Deep background in distributed systems and consensus algorithms.
• Strong skills in core Java and data structures/concurrency.
• Proven ability to build large-scale distributed systems with broad impact.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate core pieces of Serverless Elasticsearch.
• Improve components for concurrent and consistent indexing across machines.
• Maintain cluster coordination for high performance as nodes come and go.
• Push limits on shards, nodes, and petabytes handled by Elasticsearch.
• Investigate performance or concurrency issues and propose solutions.
• Support engineers with the harder problems.
• Own operational investigations end-to-end until issues are resolved.

Skills

Distributed systems

Java

Algorithms

Large-scale systems

Project ownership

Team leadership

AI acceleration

Asynchronous collaboration

Tools

JDK

Job description

Principal Java Engineer - Distributed Systems, Serverless - Elasticsearch

Greece

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:

We are on the lookout for a Principal Software Engineer to join our Elasticsearch - Distributed Systems team and focus on how Elasticsearch provides scale, performance, and resilience, especially in the context of our Serverless offering. You will be tackling deep distributed systems challenges in how nodes in an Elasticsearch cluster communicate, and how data are indexed, allocated, and managed across nodes.

What You Will Be Doing:

• Leveraging your deep distributed systems expertise to design, build, and operate core pieces of our next-generation Serverless Elasticsearch offering, directly impacting the experience of customers worldwide.
• Improving Elasticsearch’s components that support concurrent and consistent indexing across multiple machines.
• Maintaining our cluster coordination system to keep performance high even though nodes come and go from the cluster and data moves around, while maintaining the safety and liveness properties of the system as a whole.
• Pushing the limits on the number of shards, nodes, and petabytes that Elasticsearch can handle today.
• Looking into all kinds of issues, including performance or concurrency issues, and proposing solutions.
• Supporting our support engineers with the harder problems.
• Owning operational investigations end-to-end, until performance or stability issues are successfully resolved.

What You Bring:

• You have a deep background in distributed systems and consensus algorithms.
• You have strong skills in core Java and are conversant in the standard library of data structures and concurrency constructs, as well as newer language features.
• You have a deep technical proficiency in algorithms.
• You have experience building large-scale distributed systems, rather than making use of off-the-shelf services.
• You have experience building and debugging complex features with a broad impact, running on multiple machines.
• You are able to own projects from beginning to end. This covers both technical design and working with others to develop needed components.
• You have experience managing projects involving multiple engineers.
• You have a proven track record of using AI to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimize code, while still owning the final outcomes.
• 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 results in a distributed team by leveraging asynchronous, direct, and transparent communication.

Bonus Points:

• Search, analytics, Lucene
• Strong knowledge of the JDK
• Asynchronous event-driven network frameworks such as Netty

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:

Additional Information - We Take Care of Our People

As a distributed company, diversity drives our identity. Whether you’re looking to launch a new career or grow an existing one, Elastic is the type of company where you can balance great work with great life. Your age is only a number. It doesn’t matter if you’re just out of college or your children are; we need you for what you can do.

We strive to have parity of benefits across regions and while regulations differ from place to place, we believe taking care of our people is the right thing to do.

• Competitive pay based on the work you do here and not your previous salary
• Health coverage for you and your family in many locations
• Ability to craft your calendar with flexible locations and schedules for many roles
• Generous number of vacation days each year
• Increase your impact - We match up to $2000 (or local currency equivalent) for financial donations and service
• Up to 40 hours each year to use toward volunteer projects you love
• Embracing parenthood with minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave

Different people approach problems differently. We need that. Elastic is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, ethnicity, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, disability status, or any other basis protected by federal, state or local law, ordinance or regulation.

We welcome individuals with disabilities and strive to create an accessible and inclusive experience for all individuals. To request an accommodation during the application or the recruiting process, please email [e-mail] We will reply to your request within 24 business hours of submission.

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