Principal Software Engineer: Elasticsearch Performance

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

Benefits offered by this job

Stock program

401k with matching

Healthcare coverage for you and family

Job summary

Elastic, the Search AI Company, seeks a Principal Software Engineer to lead architectural and code-level performance improvements in Elasticsearch.

You will own core performance initiatives, develop models for distributed systems, profile bottlenecks in logging, vector search, and ES|QL, and mentor engineers while driving AI-assisted optimization.

This role offers a competitive USD salary, stock program, and a comprehensive benefits package.

Qualifications

• Experience with Java/JVM internals and memory management.
• Strong understanding of concurrency and thread-safety in high-performance code.
• Proven ability to profile and optimize distributed systems across large codebases.
• Experience applying AI-assisted tooling to accelerate optimization and benchmarking workflows.

Responsibilities

• Own core performance initiatives from architecture to production.
• Develop performance models for complex distributed systems.
• Drive optimization strategies for scalability and predictability across environments.
• Profile systems to identify bottlenecks in logging, metrics, vector search, and ES|QL.
• Ensure robust benchmarks and regression detection for serverless and stateful architectures.
• Mentor engineers and promote performance-first thinking across the org.

Skills

Java/JVM performance

Concurrency models

Profiling distributed systems

AI-assisted optimization

Cross-functional collaboration

Autonomous work style

Tools

Flamegraphs

JMH

Rally

Job description

Elastic, the Search AI Company, seeks a Principal Software Engineer to lead architectural and code-level performance improvements in Elasticsearch.

You will own core performance initiatives, develop models for distributed systems, profile bottlenecks in logging, vector search, and ES|QL, and mentor engineers while driving AI-assisted optimization.

This role offers a competitive USD salary, stock program, and a comprehensive benefits package.