Senior Java Developer - Core/Infra - Elasticsearch

United States Digital Space LLC; United States; Hybrid; USD 77,530 - 165,966; Full time

Job summary

Search AI Company seeks a Senior Software Developer to join the Elasticsearch team and ensure shared platform functionalities are easy to use, fast, maintainable, and secure.

You will craft APIs, improve observability, and own end-to-end projects across serverless, cloud, and on-prem environments, collaborating with multiple teams and contributing to open source efforts.

Qualifications

• Experience crafting APIs and reasoning through tradeoffs.
• Strong knowledge of algorithms and data structures.
• Proficiency in core Java and concurrency concepts.
• Hands-on CI/CD experience with Buildkite/Argo CD.
• Experience leading large scale engineering projects.
• Ability to own end-to-end projects and drive outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to large, impactful projects that evolve core infrastructure for Elasticsearch.
• Identify opportunities for automation and integrate agentic apps into workflows.
• Design and implement horizontally scalable features and APIs.
• Resolve performance or concurrency issues and propose solutions.
• Improve observability and operational health of cloud systems.
• Collaborate openly with ES team, users, and open source projects.
• Support support engineers with complex problems.
• Own investigations end-to-end until stability is achieved.

Skills

APIs design

Algorithms

Java concurrency

CI/CD

Large-scale projects

Autonomy

Cross-functional collaboration

AI-assisted development

Tools

Buildkite

Argo CD

GitOps

Gradle/Maven

Job description

The company, 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 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—the company’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 Software Developer 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

• Contributing to large, impactful projects that evolve the core infrastructure that underpins Elasticsearch.
• 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, the company 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

• Experience crafting APIs and the ability to reason through tradeoffs.
• Proficient in algorithms and data structures.
• You have strong skills in core Java and are conversant in the standard library of data structures and concurrency constructs, as well as newer language features.
• Experience with low‑level Java such as concurrency, parallelism, classloaders, etc.
• Hands‑on experience with CI/CD systems and practices (Buildkite, Argo CD, GitOps, etc).
• 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

• Knowledge of JDK internals: modules, the Java memory model, garbage collection, database load, caching techniques, etc.
• Experience with observability and telemetry solutions, particularly OpenTelemetry.
• Knowledge of Go.
• Knowledge of containers and Kubernetes.
• Knowledge of Java build tools (Gradle, Maven, etc), with a strong preference for Gradle experience.
• Experience working in a platform team or developer productivity team.

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 $128,300 – $203,000 CAD.

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.

The company 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 the company’s stock program. Our total rewards package also includes a company‑matched Registered Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP) 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.

Additional Information – We Take Care of Our People

• 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 minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave.

Different people approach problems differently. We need that. The company 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.