Principal Performance Engineer - Distributed Systems

Elastic; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 160,000 - 253,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage

Flexible locations & schedules

Vacation days

Donations matched

Job summary

Elastic, the Search AI Company, seeks a Principal Software Engineer to join the Elasticsearch Performance team. You will drive architectural and code-level performance initiatives, guiding optimizations across distributed systems and ensuring scalability in diverse environments.

You will mentor engineers, build AI-assisted optimization harnesses, and collaborate across teams to embed performance-first thinking from the outset.

Qualifications

• Deep knowledge of Java internals and JVM memory management; understands concurrency models and writes high-performance, thread-safe, lock-free code.
• Proven profiling and optimization experience on distributed systems; familiar with benchmarking tools and regression detection.
• Solid understanding of distributed systems architecture including partition tolerance and scaling of large data stores.
• Proven track record of using AI or advanced tooling to accelerate optimization and automate benchmarking workflows.

Responsibilities

• Own core performance engineering initiatives from architecture to production, delivering high-impact optimizations.
• Develop performance models and methodologies for complex distributed systems.
• Drive optimization strategies for performance, predictability, and scalability across environments.
• 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 the company to embed performance-first thinking into new features.
• Design and build AI-assisted optimization harnesses to streamline profiling and benchmarking.
• Mentor and coach engineers to foster performance-aware development.

Skills

Java internals

JVM memory management

Concurrency

Profiling

Distributed systems

Benchmarking

AI tooling

Collaboration

Tools

Flamegraphs

JMH

Rally

Job description

Elastic, the Search AI Company, seeks a Principal Software Engineer to join the Elasticsearch Performance team. You will drive architectural and code-level performance initiatives, guiding optimizations across distributed systems and ensuring scalability in diverse environments.

You will mentor engineers, build AI-assisted optimization harnesses, and collaborate across teams to embed performance-first thinking from the outset.