Principal Performance Engineer — Elasticsearch Optimization

Referral Board; Town of Poland (NY); Hybrid; USD 102,000 - 188,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage

Flexible locations

Generous vacation days

Donation matching

Volunteer hours

Parental leave

Job summary

Elastic is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead performance tuning for Elasticsearch. You will own architecture-to-production performance initiatives, develop modeling methodologies, and drive optimization across distributed systems.

The role requires deep JVM/Java expertise, profiling experience, and collaboration across teams. We value AI-assisted optimization and a strong track record of scalable, high-performance software.

Qualifications

• Deep knowledge of Java internals and JVM memory management.
• Proven profiling/optimization of distributed systems.
• Understanding of distributed architectures and scaling challenges.
• Experience using AI or advanced tooling to accelerate optimization.
• Ability to collaborate across functions and teams.

Responsibilities

• Own core performance initiatives from architecture to production.
• Develop performance models for distributed systems.
• Drive optimization strategies for performance, predictability, and scalability.
• Profile and analyze system behavior to identify bottlenecks in logging, metrics, and vector search.
• Ensure robust benchmarks and regression detection for stateful and Serverless architectures.
• Mentor engineers and promote performance-aware development.

Skills

Java internals

JVM memory management

Concurrency models

High-performance code

Profiling distributed systems

Benchmarking tools

AI-assisted optimization

Cross-team collaboration

Tools

Flamegraphs

JMH

Rally

Job description

Elastic is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead performance tuning for Elasticsearch. You will own architecture-to-production performance initiatives, develop modeling methodologies, and drive optimization across distributed systems.

The role requires deep JVM/Java expertise, profiling experience, and collaboration across teams. We value AI-assisted optimization and a strong track record of scalable, high-performance software.