Senior Java Engineer - Core/Infra - Elasticsearch Elastic

Neura Market; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 160,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage

Generous vacation

Parental leave

Donations match

Volunteer hours

Flexible scheduling

Job summary

Elastic is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join the Elasticsearch team, focusing on core infrastructure, observability, and scalable APIs. You will lead cross-team projects, design low-level concurrency solutions, and advance serverless orchestration and CI/CD workflows.

The role demands strong Java, data structures, and experience with modern tooling such as Gradle, Kubernetes, and OpenTelemetry. You will drive architectural decisions and collaborate across teams to deliver robust

Qualifications

• Experience crafting APIs and the ability to reason through tradeoffs.
• Proficient in algorithms and data structures.
• Strong skills in core Java and concurrency; familiarity with standard library and newer features.
• Experience with low-level Java such as concurrency, parallelism, classloaders.
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD systems and practices (Buildkite, Argo CD, GitOps).
• Experience leading large scale projects across engineering teams.
• Ability to own projects end-to-end including technical design and cross-team collaboration.
• Track record of using AI to accelerate development, debugging, and optimization while owning outcomes.
• Ability to collaborate across functions and manage multiple projects asynchronously.

Responsibilities

• Contributing to large, impactful projects that evolve core infrastructure of Elasticsearch.
• Increase developer productivity by automating workflows and integrating agentic apps into development processes.
• Designing and implementing new horizontally-scalable features and APIs in Elasticsearch.
• Addressing performance or concurrency issues and proposing solutions.
• Improve operation and observability of Elasticsearch cloud systems.
• Collaborate openly with ES team, Elastic users, and open source projects.
• Support our engineers with difficult problems and lead end-to-end investigations until resolved.

Skills

APIs design

Algorithms

Java concurrency

CI/CD

Leadership

Asynchronous communication

Tools

Build tools (Gradle/Maven)

Go

Kubernetes

OpenTelemetry

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

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 minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave

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.

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