Senior Java Engineer - Distributed Systems, Serverless - Elasticsearch

Elastic; Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York (WA, CA, CA, NY); On-site; USD 133,000 - 253,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive pay

Health coverage for you and yourFamily

Flexible locations and schedules

Generous vacation days

Donations match up to $2000

Volunteer hours

Parental leave

Job summary

Elastic in Seattle, WA seeks a Senior Software Engineer for the Elasticsearch - Distributed Systems team, focusing on scale, performance, and resilience in our Serverless offering.

You will tackle deep distributed systems challenges across nodes, improve concurrent indexing and cluster coordination, and push the limits on shards and petabytes while owning end-to-end investigations and collaborating across teams.

Qualifications

• Deep background in distributed systems and consensus algorithms.
• Strong Java skills and knowledge of data structures and concurrency constructs.
• Deep proficiency in algorithms.
• Experience with complex distributed systems, not just off-the-shelf services.
• Ability to own projects end-to-end and collaborate across teams.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate core pieces of our next-generation Serverless Elasticsearch offering, impacting customers worldwide.
• Improve components that support concurrent and consistent indexing across multiple machines.
• Maintain cluster coordination to handle nodes joining/leaving and data moves while ensuring safety and liveness.
• Push the limits on the number of shards, nodes, and petabytes Elasticsearch can handle today.
• Investigate performance or concurrency issues and propose solutions.
• Support our support engineers with harder problems.
• Own operational investigations end-to-end until issues are resolved.

Skills

Distributed systems

Consensus algorithms

Java

Data structures

Concurrency constructs

Algorithms

Autonomous work

Tools

Netty

JDK

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 Software Engineer to join our Elasticsearch - Distributed Systems team and focus on how Elasticsearch provides scale, performance, and resilience, especially in the context of our Serverless offering. You will be tackling deep distributed systems challenges in how nodes in an Elasticsearch cluster communicate, and how data are indexed, allocated, and managed across nodes.

What You Will Be Doing:

• Leveraging your distributed systems expertise to build, and operate core pieces of our next-generation Serverless Elasticsearch offering, directly impacting the experience of customers worldwide.
• Improving Elasticsearch’s components that support concurrent and consistent indexing across multiple machines.
• Maintaining our cluster coordination system to keep performance high even though nodes come and go from the cluster and data moves around, while maintaining the safety and liveness properties of the system as a whole.
• Pushing the limits on the number of shards, nodes, and petabytes that Elasticsearch can handle today.
• Looking into all kinds of issues, including performance or concurrency issues, and proposing solutions.
• 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:

• You have a deep background in distributed systems and consensus algorithms.
• 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.
• You have a deep technical proficiency in algorithms.
• You have shown your ability to understand and work on complex, highly distributed systems, rather than making use of off-the-shelf services.
• You demonstrate the ability to build and debug features with a broad impact, running on multiple machines.
• 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:

• Data stores
• Search, analytics, Lucene
• Strong knowledge of the JDK
• Asynchronous event-driven network frameworks such as Netty.

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

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