Principal Search Infrastructure Engineer

Elastic; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 159,800 - 252,800; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage

Flexible locations & schedules

Generous vacation days

Donation matching

Volunteer hours

Parental leave

Job summary

Elastic is seeking a Principal Software Engineer for the Elasticsearch - Search Infra team. You will define, lead, and contribute to core search/infrastructure, focusing on indexing, retrieval, and relevance.

The role requires deep expertise in search internals and cross-team collaboration to shape Elastic's next-generation capabilities. You will work with distributed teams across continents, influencing technical direction, roadmap, and software design from concept to completion, leveraging

Qualifications

• Experience leading technical projects in the search infrastructure and distributed systems.
• Experience mentoring expert engineers and guiding professional development.
• Experience defining a long-term technical vision for a core search or retrieval system with cross-team impact.
• Hands-on experience with search and indexing technologies such as Elasticsearch, Lucene, or Solr.
• Strong Java skills and knowledge of data structures, concurrency, and modern language features like lambdas.
• Ability to work autonomously from concept to completion and collaborate with engineers to build components.
• Experience with large-scale data or search systems (Elasticsearch, Lucene, Solr) and distributed storage engines.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills; comfort collaborating across distributed teams.

Responsibilities

• Define, lead, and contribute to the evolution of core search and indexing capabilities.
• Research advances in search infrastructure, data structures, and retrieval algorithms to shape a technical roadmap.
• Collaborate with partners and product teams to align with long-term vision for Elasticsearch search.
• Drive an innovative roadmap for indexing, query execution, and relevance layers.
• Serve as a go-to expert for Elasticsearch domains and improve them through insights.

Skills

Technical leadership

Mentoring engineers

Technical vision

Search infrastructure

Elasticsearch/Lucene/Solr

Java

Data structures

Concurrency

Autonomy

Large-scale data systems

Cross-team collaboration

Open source experience

Education

Bachelor's or higher in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Elasticsearch

Lucene

Solr

Job description

Elastic is seeking a Principal Software Engineer for the Elasticsearch - Search Infra team. You will define, lead, and contribute to core search/infrastructure, focusing on indexing, retrieval, and relevance.

The role requires deep expertise in search internals and cross-team collaboration to shape Elastic's next-generation capabilities. You will work with distributed teams across continents, influencing technical direction, roadmap, and software design from concept to completion, leveraging