Principal Software Engineer, Search Infrastructure

Elastic; Town of Sweden (NY); On-site; USD 86,080 - 136,164; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage for you and your loved

Flexible locations and schedules

Generous vacation days

Donation matching up to $2000

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 and indexing capabilities across a globally distributed team, shaping the long-term technical vision for Elasticsearch.

You’ll mentor engineers and collaborate with product teams to build high-performance search foundations. We value autonomy and cross-team collaboration as we deliver fast, scalable software.

Qualifications

• Experience leading technical projects in the search infrastructure and distributed systems space.
• Experience mentoring expert engineers, providing both technical and professional guidance.
• Experience defining a long-term technical vision for a core search or retrieval system, working across teams to shape the roadmap.
• Hands‑on experience with search and indexing technologies such as Elasticsearch, Lucene, or Solr.
• Strong Java skills and familiarity with advanced data structures and concurrency constructs.

Responsibilities

• Define, lead, and contribute to the evolution of core search and indexing capabilities.
• Research advances in search infrastructure, data structures, and retrieval algorithms.
• Shape the long-term technical vision for search at Elastic with product teams.
• Drive an innovative roadmap for Elasticsearch’s indexing, query execution, and relevance layers.
• Be the go-to expert for several Elasticsearch domains across distributed teams.

Skills

Lead technical projects

Mentor engineers

Technical vision

Elasticsearch/Lucene/Solr

Java

Distributed systems

Autonomy

Cross-team collaboration

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 and indexing capabilities across a globally distributed team, shaping the long-term technical vision for Elasticsearch.

You’ll mentor engineers and collaborate with product teams to build high-performance search foundations. We value autonomy and cross-team collaboration as we deliver fast, scalable software.