Principal Performance Engineer — Scalable AI for Search

Elastic; United States; On-site; USD 160,000 - 253,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive pay

Health coverage

Flexible locations & schedules

Generous vacation days

Donation matching

Volunteer hours

Parental leave

Job summary

Elastic is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to join the Elasticsearch Performance team in the United States. You will lead architectural and code-level performance initiatives, driving continuous optimization and predictability of Elasticsearch across distributed environments.

You will mentor engineers, collaborate across teams to embed performance-first thinking, and design AI-assisted optimization harnesses to streamline profiling and benchmarking.

Qualifications

• Deep knowledge of Java internals and JVM memory management; concurrency models; high-performance, thread-safe code.
• Proven profiling/optimizing distributed systems; experience with benchmarking tools; regression detection.
• Solid understanding of distributed systems architecture; partition tolerance and scaling large data stores.
• Proven use of AI or advanced tooling to accelerate optimization and automate benchmarking workflows.
• Ability to collaborate across functions and teams and work autonomously in distributed environments.

Responsibilities

• Own performance engineering initiatives from architecture to production, delivering high-impact optimizations.
• Develop baselines and methodologies for profiling complex distributed systems.
• Drive optimization strategies for performance, predictability, and scalability.
• 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 in new features.
• Drive automation by building AI-assisted optimization harnesses for profiling and benchmarking.
• Mentor engineers to foster performance-aware development.

Skills

Java internals and JVM memory mgmt

Distributed systems profiling

Performance modeling

AI-assisted optimization tooling

Cross-team collaboration

Autonomous decision making

Tools

Flamegraphs

JMH

Rally

Job description

Elastic is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to join the Elasticsearch Performance team in the United States. You will lead architectural and code-level performance initiatives, driving continuous optimization and predictability of Elasticsearch across distributed environments.

You will mentor engineers, collaborate across teams to embed performance-first thinking, and design AI-assisted optimization harnesses to streamline profiling and benchmarking.