Principal Java Engineer - Distributed Systems, Serverless - Elasticsearch
Elastic
Salary undisclosed
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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 Principal 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 deep distributed systems expertise to design, 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 experience building large-scale distributed systems, rather than making use of off-the-shelf services.
- You have experience building and debugging complex 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 experience managing projects involving multiple engineers.
- 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 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 candidate_accessibility@elastic.co. We will reply to your request within 24 business hours of submission.
Applicants have rights under Federal Employment Laws, view posters linked below: Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) Poster; Pay Transparency Nondiscrimination Provision Poster; Employee Polygraph Protection Act (EPPA) Poster and Know Your Rights (Poster)
Elasticsearch develops and distributes technology and information that is subject to U.S. and other countries’ export controls and licensing requirements for individuals who are located in or are nationals of the following sanctioned countries and regions: Belarus, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, or Russia, including the Ukrainian territories annexed by Russia (The Crimea region of Ukraine, The Donetsk People's Republic (DNR), The Luhansk People's Republic (LNR), Kherson or Zaporizhzhia). If you are located in or are a national of one of the listed countries or regions, an export license may be required as a condition of your employment in this role. Please note that national origin and/or nationality do not affect eligibility for employment with Elastic.
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Benefits
- parental leave
About this role
Elastic's Distributed Systems team is building the next generation of their Serverless Elasticsearch offering, and this Principal role sits at the heart of that work. You'd own core architectural challenges around how nodes communicate, how data gets indexed and allocated across clusters, and how the system scales to handle vastly larger numbers of shards, nodes, and data volumes. This is deep systems engineering: consensus algorithms, cluster coordination, concurrent indexing, and the operational investigations that follow when performance or stability issues emerge in production.
The role demands someone with genuine distributed systems expertise and strong Java fundamentals—not someone who assembles off-the-shelf services, but someone who has built large-scale systems from the ground up. You'll need to think clearly about algorithms, concurrency constructs, and the JDK itself. Beyond technical depth, you'll own projects end-to-end, collaborate across teams, and manage engineers working on components with broad impact. The job also values your ability to use AI as a tool to accelerate development and debugging, while still owning the final outcomes.
This is an in-office role in the GB location. Elastic offers competitive pay, health coverage, flexible working arrangements for many roles, generous vacation, parental leave of at least 16 weeks, and volunteer time. If you have a track record in distributed systems, strong Java skills, and experience shipping complex features across multiple machines, this is worth a close look.
How this employer is doing
average
- News: Recently Raised Funding
- Recent Acquisition
In the news
Ausbil Investment Management Ltd Acquires 7,402 Shares of Elastic N.V. $ESTC, Americanbankingnews
Pay for this role
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