Senior Java Engineer - Core/Infra - Elasticsearch

United States Digital Space LLC; United States; On-site; USD 133,100 - 210,600; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage

Flexible schedules

Volunteer days

Company matching donations

Job summary

Search AI Company in the United States is seeking a Senior Software 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.

You will be a strong individual contributor on the team, but you will also contribute to and lead cross-team projects, design scalable features, and drive collaboration across engineers and open source communities.

Qualifications

• Experience crafting APIs and the ability to reason through tradeoffs.
• Proficient in algorithms and data structures.
• Strong skills in core Java and concurrent programming concepts.
• Experience with low-level Java concurrency and classloaders.
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD systems and practices (Buildkite, Argo CD, GitOps).
• Experience leading large scale projects across engineering teams.

Responsibilities

• Contributing to large, impactful projects that evolve the core infrastructure that underpins Elasticsearch.
• Making Elasticsearch developers more productive by automation and integrating agentic apps into workflows.
• Designing and implementing new horizontally‑scalable features and APIs in Elasticsearch.
• Solving difficult issues including performance or concurrency concerns and proposing solutions.
• Improving operation and observability of Elasticsearch cloud systems.
• Collaborating openly with the ES team, users, and other open source projects.

Skills

APIs design

Algorithms & data structures

Java

Concurrency

CI/CD

Leadership

Tools

Gradle

Maven

OpenTelemetry

Kubernetes

Go

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 the company 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 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

• 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 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.

This role is currently eligible to participate in the company's stock program. Our total rewards package also includes a company‑matched 401(k) 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

As a distributed company, diversity drives our identity. Whether you’re looking to launch a new career or grow an existing one, the company 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 par