Principal Java Engineer — Serverless Distributed Systems

Elasticsearch B.V.; Town of Norway (WI); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage

Flexible locations & schedules

Generous vacation days

Donations matching program

Volunteer hours

Parental leave

Job summary

Elastic is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to join the Elasticsearch - Distributed Systems team. You will tackle deep distributed systems challenges around node communication, indexing, and data management in a Serverless context.

The role emphasizes owning design-to-delivery and collaborating across teams to scale performance and resilience. You will work with Java experts to optimize concurrency, indexing, and cluster coordination while advancing AI-assisted development.

Qualifications

• Deep background in distributed systems and consensus algorithms.
• Strong skills in core Java and standard data structures/concurrency.
• Deep technical proficiency in algorithms.
• Experience building large-scale distributed systems.
• Experience building and debugging complex features with broad impact on multiple machines.
• Able to own projects from design to delivery with teams.
• Experience managing projects involving multiple engineers.
• Proven track record of using AI to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimize code.
• Ability to collaborate across functions and shift between projects by priority.
• Work autonomously and drive decisions in a distributed team using async communication.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate core pieces of our next-generation Serverless Elasticsearch offering.
• Improve components that support concurrent and consistent indexing across machines.
• Maintain cluster coordination to handle nodes joining/leaving and data movement while preserving safety.
• Push the limits on shards, nodes, and petabytes the system can handle.
• Investigate performance or concurrency issues and propose solutions.
• Support our engineers with harder problems and incidents.
• Own operational investigations end-to-end until performance or stability issues are resolved.

Skills

Distributed systems

Consensus algorithms

Core Java

Data structures

Concurrency

Algorithms

Large-scale systems

Project ownership

Cross-functional collaboration

AI-assisted development

Tools

Netty

JDK tooling

Job description

Elastic is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to join the Elasticsearch - Distributed Systems team. You will tackle deep distributed systems challenges around node communication, indexing, and data management in a Serverless context.

The role emphasizes owning design-to-delivery and collaborating across teams to scale performance and resilience. You will work with Java experts to optimize concurrency, indexing, and cluster coordination while advancing AI-assisted development.