Senior Go/Kubernetes Engineer - Core/Infra - Elasticsearch

Elastic; Mountain View (CA); Remote; USD 133,000 - 211,000; 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 Senior Kubernetes/Go Engineer to strengthen the Elasticsearch team. You will design and implement distributed systems, own Kubernetes orchestration in cloud environments, and drive automation to boost developer productivity.

You will collaborate across teams, contribute to core infrastructure projects, and help deliver serverless, cloud, and on‑premise Elasticsearch offerings with a focus on security and performance.

Qualifications

• Strong Go skills with concurrency primitives, error handling, and generics.
• Experience building Kubernetes controllers (controller-runtime, client-go) is a plus.
• Hands-on experience with containers and Kubernetes.
• Experience crafting APIs and reasoning through tradeoffs.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and evolve distributed systems for Serverless Elasticsearch on cloud providers.
• Contribute to large projects that evolve core infrastructure for Elasticsearch.
• Own Kubernetes orchestration of Elasticsearch clusters in the cloud.
• Improve developer productivity by automation and integration in workflows.
• Design and implement horizontally scalable features and APIs in Elasticsearch.
• Resolve performance and concurrency issues with proposed solutions.
• Improve operation and observability of Elasticsearch cloud systems.
• Collaborate with Elastic users and open source projects.

Skills

Go

Kubernetes

Containers

API design

Algorithms

Leadership

AI acceleration

Collaboration

Tools

controller-runtime

client-go

OpenTelemetry

Job description

Elastic, the Search AI Company, enables everyone to find the answers they need in real time, using all their data, at scale - unleashing the potential of businesses and people. The Elastic Search AI Platform, used by more than 50% of the Fortune 500, brings together the precision of search and the intelligence of AI to enable everyone to accelerate the results that matter. By taking advantage of all structured and unstructured data - securing and protecting private information more effectively - Elastic's complete, cloud-based solutions for search, security, and observability help organizations deliver on the promise of AI.

What is The Role:

We are on the lookout for a Senior Kubernetes/Go Engineer to join our Elasticsearch team and focus on ensuring that the shared platform functionalities of Elasticsearch are easy to use, performant, maintainable and secure.

The team's mission is to create foundational infrastructure and shared functionality that enables engineers to develop, extend, and support Elasticsearch. The team owns common functionality such as services, settings and scripting, and makes Elasticsearch extensible through plugins or the Painless scripting language. The team also makes Elasticsearch observable by providing logging and telemetry information. We also own the orchestration of Elasticsearch in serverless, the CI/CD workflows and enable Elasticsearch developers to deliver Elasticsearch to customers - serverless, cloud and on-premise alike.

You will be a strong individual contributor on the team but you will also contribute to and lead cross team projects. We need someone who has great design skills, who can work at a low level of abstraction but can equally drive and communicate technical concepts across a variety of collaborators.

What You Will Be Doing:

• Designing, building, and evolving the distributed systems that orchestrate and manage Serverless Elasticsearch projects across cloud service providers.
• Contributing to large, impactful projects that evolve the core infrastructure that underpins Elasticsearch.
• Owning the Kubernetes orchestration of Elasticsearch clusters in cloud.
• Making Elasticsearch developers more productive by identifying and developing opportunities for automation, and integrating agentic apps into development workflows.
• Designing and implementing new horizontally-scalable features and APIs in Elasticsearch.
• Solving difficult issues, including performance or concurrency issues, and proposing solutions.
• Improving operation and observability of Elasticsearch cloud systems.
• Collaborating in the open with the ES team, Elastic users, and other supporting open source projects.
• Supporting our support engineers with the harder problems.
• Owning operational investigations end-to-end, until performance or stability issues are successfully resolved.

What You Bring:

• Strong Go skills: you're fluent with its concurrency primitives (goroutines, channels, sync, context), idiomatic error handling, and newer features like generics. Experience building Kubernetes controllers (controller-runtime, client-go) is a strong plus.
• You have hands‑on experience with containers and Kubernetes.
• Experience crafting APIs and the ability to reason through tradeoffs.
• Proficient in algorithms and data structures.
• Experience leading large scale projects across engineering teams.
• Willingness to dive into new issues and ask for help when you need it.
• You are able to own projects from beginning to end. This covers both technical design and working with others to develop needed components.
• You have a proven track record of using AI to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimize code, while still owning the final outcomes.
• You possess the ability to collaborate across functions and teams and seamlessly transition between different projects, codebases, or teams based on business priorities
• You can work autonomously, drive decisions and results in a distributed team by leveraging asynchronous, direct, and transparent communication

Bonus Points:

• Experience with Java and the standard Java library of data structures and concurrency constructs.
• Knowledge of JDK internals: modules, the Java memory model, garbage collection, database load, caching techniques, etc.
• Hands‑on experience with CI/CD systems and practices (Buildkite, Argo CD, GitOps etc).
• Knowledge of Java build tools (Gradle, Maven, etc), with a strong preference for Gradle experience.
• Experience with observability and telemetry solutions, particularly OpenTelemetry
• Experience working in a platform team or developer productivity team

Additional Information - We Take Care of Our People:

As a distributed company, diversity drives our identity. Whether you're looking to launch a new career or grow an existing one, Elastic is the type of company where you can balance great work with great life. Your age is only a number. It doesn't matter if you're just out of college or your children are; we need you for what you can do.

We strive to have parity of benefits across regions, and while regulations differ from place to place, we believe taking care of our people is the right thing to do.

• Competitive pay based on the work you do here and not your previous salary
• Health coverage for you and your family in many locations
• Ability to craft your calendar with flexible locations and schedules for many roles
• Generous number of vacation days each year
• Increase your impact - We match up to $2000 (or local currency equivalent) for financial donations and service
• Up to 40 hours each year to use toward volunteer projects you love
• Embracing parenthood with a minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave

Security & Privacy Responsibilities: Take ownership of protecting the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of organizational data and systems by following applicable privacy and security policies, standards, and procedures. Ensure that all individual contributions follow Elastic's Secure Software Development Framework (SSDF). Proactively participate in mandatory role-based training to ensure personal technical execution consistently aligns with the highest standards of data protection, data privacy, and system resilience.

Different people approach problems differently. We need that. Elastic is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to creating an inclusive culture that celebrates different perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, ethnicity, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, disability status, or any other basis protected by federal, state or local law, ordinance or regulation.

We welcome individuals with disabilities and strive to create an accessible and inclusive experience for all individuals. To request an accommodation during the application or the recruiting process, please email [e-mail]. We will reply to your request within 24 business hours of submission.

Applicants have rights under Federal Employment Laws and can view the following posters linked below:

Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) Poster

Employee Polygraph Protection Act (EPPA) Poster

Elasticsearch develops and distributes technology and information that is subject to U.S. and other countries' export controls and licensing requirements for individuals who are located in or are nationals of the following sanctioned countries and regions: Belarus, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, or Russia, including the Ukrainian territories annexed by Russia (The Crimea region of Ukraine, The Donetsk People's Republic (DNR), The Luhansk People's Republic (LNR), Kherson or Zaporizhzhia). If you are located in or are a national of one of the listed countries or regions, an export license may be required as a condition of your employment in this role. Please note that national origin and/or nationality do not affect eligibility for employment with Elastic.

Please see here for our Privacy Statement.

Compensation for this role is in the form of base salary. This role does not have a variable compensation component.

The typical starting salary range for new hires in this role is listed below. In select locations (including Seattle WA, Los Angeles CA, the San Francisco Bay Area CA, and the New York City Metro Area), an alternate range may apply as specified below.

These ranges represent the lowest to highest salary we reasonably and in good faith believe we would pay for this role at the time of this posting. We may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range, and the ranges may be modified in the future.

An employee's position within the salary range will be based on several factors including, but not limited to, relevant education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, geographic location, performance, and business or organizational needs.

Elastic believes that employees should have the opportunity to share in the value that we create together for our shareholders. Therefore, in addition to cash compensation, this role is currently eligible to participate in Elastic's stock program. Our total rewards package also includes a company-matched 401k with dollar-for-dollar matching up to 6% of eligible earnings, along with a range of other benefits offered with a holistic emphasis on employee well-being.

The typical starting salary range for this role is:

$133,100-$210,600 USD

The typical starting salary range for this role in the select locations listed above is:

$159,900-$252,900 USD