Senior Software Engineer — Performance & Distributed Systems

Elastic; United States; On-site; USD 133,000 - 211,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive pay

Health coverage

Flexible scheduling

Vacation days

Donation matching

Volunteer hours

Parental leave

Job summary

Elastic, the Search AI Company, seeks a Senior Software Engineer for the Elasticsearch Performance team. You will contribute to performance engineering initiatives—optimizing core code paths, profiling distributed systems, and driving scalable improvements across deployments.

You will collaborate across teams, implement AI-assisted optimization methods, and mentor peers while advancing benchmarking and regression detection in stateful and serverless contexts.

Qualifications

• Deep knowledge of Java internals and JVM memory management.
• Proven profiling/optimizing of distributed systems with benchmarking tools.
• Solid understanding of distributed systems architecture and scaling challenges.

Responsibilities

• Contributing to core performance initiatives from development to production.
• Implementing performance models and optimization methodologies for distributed systems.
• Profiling system behavior to identify bottlenecks in logging, metrics, and vector search.
• Ensuring robust benchmarks and regression detection for stateful and serverless architectures.
• Collaborating across teams to apply performance-focused development practices.
• Building AI-assisted optimization harnesses to streamline profiling and benchmarking.
• Providing technical guidance and peer reviews to engineers.

Skills

Java internals

JVM memory management

Concurrency models

High-performance coding

Thread-safety

Lock-free programming

Profiling distributed systems

Benchmarking tools (JMH, Rally)

Distributed systems architecture

AI-assisted optimization tooling

Collaborative teamwork

Async communication

Tools

JMH

Rally

Job description

Elastic, the Search AI Company, seeks a Senior Software Engineer for the Elasticsearch Performance team. You will contribute to performance engineering initiatives—optimizing core code paths, profiling distributed systems, and driving scalable improvements across deployments.

You will collaborate across teams, implement AI-assisted optimization methods, and mentor peers while advancing benchmarking and regression detection in stateful and serverless contexts.