Senior Java Engineer - Core/Infra - Elasticsearch

Referral Board; United States; On-site; USD 133,100 - 210,600; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage

Flexible locations and schedules

Generous vacation days

Donation matching program

Volunteer time off

Parental leave

Job summary

Elastic is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join the Elasticsearch team, building foundational infrastructure and shared functionality that powers serverless, cloud, and on‑premise Elasticsearch deployments. You will own design and implementation of scalable features, mentor others, and help accelerate development with AI-driven approaches.

You will work across teams to improve performance, observability, and developer productivity, while communicating technical concepts clearly and

Qualifications

• Experience crafting APIs and weighing tradeoffs.
• Strong algorithms and data structures knowledge.
• Proficient in core Java and concurrency concepts.
• Hands-on CI/CD with Buildkite/Argo CD and GitOps.
• Experience leading large-scale projects across teams.
• Owns projects end-to-end and communicates clearly.
• Proven ability to use AI to accelerate development.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to core infrastructure that underpins Elasticsearch.
• Improve developer productivity and automate development workflows.
• Design and implement scalable features and APIs.
• Address performance and concurrency challenges with solutions.
• Improve observability of cloud systems and support open source efforts.
• Collaborate across teams and support engineers on difficult problems.
• Own end-to-end investigations from start to stable resolution.

Skills

APIs

Algorithms

Java

CI/CD

Leadership

AI in development

Cross-functional collaboration

Autonomous work

Tools

Buildkite

Argo CD

GitOps

Gradle

Maven

Job description

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, 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

• 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

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:

• $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

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 $2,000 (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.

Equal Opportunity

Elastic is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, ethnicity, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, 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.