Principal Performance Engineer – Distributed Systems

Socket.dev; United States; On-site; USD 160,000 - 253,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

401k with employer match

Health coverage for you and family

Flexible locations & schedules

Generous vacation days

Volunteer time off

Job summary

Elastic seeks a Principal Software Engineer to lead the Elasticsearch Performance team, driving architectural and code-level performance improvements across distributed systems. You’ll own high-impact optimizations, model performance, and benchmark development, mentoring others to adopt performance-first practices.

You will collaborate across functions to embed performance thinking in new features and build AI-assisted tools that accelerate profiling, testing, and benchmarking.

Qualifications

• Deep knowledge of Java internals and JVM memory management.
• Experience profiling and optimizing distributed systems with benchmarking tools.
• Solid understanding of distributed architectures and scaling challenges.
• Track record using AI/tools to speed up optimization and benchmarking.

Responsibilities

• Own performance initiatives from architecture to production.
• Develop performance models for complex distributed systems.
• Drive optimization strategies for high throughput, scalable deployments.
• Profile system behavior to identify bottlenecks in logging, metrics, and vector search.
• Ensure robust benchmarks and regression detection for stateful/stateless stacks.
• Mentor engineers and promote performance-first development.

Skills

Java internals/JVM memory

Concurrency models

High-performance code

Distributed systems profiling

AI-assisted optimization

Cross-functional collaboration

Tools

JMH

Rally

Flamegraphs

Job description

Elastic seeks a Principal Software Engineer to lead the Elasticsearch Performance team, driving architectural and code-level performance improvements across distributed systems. You’ll own high-impact optimizations, model performance, and benchmark development, mentoring others to adopt performance-first practices.

You will collaborate across functions to embed performance thinking in new features and build AI-assisted tools that accelerate profiling, testing, and benchmarking.