Senior Performance Engineer, Competitive Benchmarking

Elastic; United States; Remote; USD 79,000 - 125,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage for you and family

Flexible locations and schedules

Generous vacation days

Volunteer time allowance

Parental leave

Job summary

Elastic is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to lead competitive benchmarking initiatives for Elasticsearch performance, including benchmarking across search, vector, and hybrid retrieval workloads. You will develop workloads, automate experiments, and compare Elasticsearch with alternative systems to guide product improvements.

You will publish benchmark artifacts and collaborate with engineering and content teams to ensure reproducible results and meaningful insights for customers.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering and automation experience in Python or similar language.
• Hands-on experience evaluating performance in distributed systems or search infrastructure.
• Ability to design representative datasets and workloads with concurrency and ingestion behavior.
• Experience building reproducible test environments and documenting configurations.
• Clear technical writing and communication of findings and limitations.

Responsibilities

• Own prioritized competitive benchmarking initiatives across search, vector and hybrid retrieval, and observability workloads.
• Build and maintain automated benchmark harnesses, datasets, query sets, and load profiles reflecting real-world usage.
• Design fair comparisons with documented system versions, configurations, and resource budgets.
• Evaluate latency, throughput, resource use, and cost, comparing recall/relevance targets.
• Adapt and extend workload tools (Elasticsearch Rally, ClickBench, vector benchmarks).
• Investigate performance differences using profiling and controlled experiments; collaborate with engineers to validate improvements.
• Evaluate cloud deployments including serverless offerings and scaling behavior.
• Publish reproducible benchmark artifacts and technical reports detailing methodology and findings.
• Collaborate with product teams to prioritize benchmarks and translate findings into product improvements.

Skills

Python automation

Distributed systems performance

Benchmarking experience

Experiment design

Profiling and instrumentation

Documentation and technical writing

Collaboration across teams

Data analysis

Tools

Elasticsearch Rally

ClickBench

Vector search benchmarks

Job description

Elastic is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to lead competitive benchmarking initiatives for Elasticsearch performance, including benchmarking across search, vector, and hybrid retrieval workloads. You will develop workloads, automate experiments, and compare Elasticsearch with alternative systems to guide product improvements.

You will publish benchmark artifacts and collaborate with engineering and content teams to ensure reproducible results and meaningful insights for customers.