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.

Do you want to work on distributed search and analytics software which impacts the lives of millions of people? We are looking for people with a deep knowledge of Java, algorithms, and concurrency and who love to take on new challenges.

As a Senior Software Engineer in Elasticsearch you will get the opportunity to work on different initiatives. Whether it’s advancing Elastic Cloud Serverless, building new analytics capabilities in ES|QL (our newest query language powered by a new compute engine), enhancing current solutions to efficiently store logs or metrics and provide a great customer experience, there is always a good challenge ahead!

Our company is distributed by intention. We hire the best engineers we can find wherever they are, whoever they are. We collaborate across continents every day over email, GitHub, Zoom, and Slack. At our best, we write fast, scalable, intuitive and high-quality software. We believe that the best way to do that is to empower individual engineers, code review every change, decide big things by consensus, and strive for incremental improvements.

What You Will Be Doing

• You'll be a full time Elasticsearch contributor, building scalable new features, fixing intriguing bugs and increasing the testing coverage, all while making the code easier to understand. Sometimes you'll need to invent a new algorithm or data structure, or find one and implement it. Sometimes you'll need to get close to the operating system and hardware.

• Tackling difficult issues, including performance or concurrency issues, and proposing solutions.

• Collaborating in the open with the Elasticsearch team, Elastic Stack users, and other supporting open source projects. You'll work with community members from all over the world on issues and pull requests, sometimes triaging them and handing them off to other experts and sometimes handling them yourself.

• Partnering with our support engineers on the harder problems.

• You'll write idiomatic modern Java -- Elasticsearch is 99.8% Java!

What You Bring

• 6+ years of Software Engineering experience, highly proficient in Java and conversant in the standard library of data structures and concurrency constructs.

• 2+ years of experience in one or more of the following areas: vector search, search engine development, query language implementation or developing storage-efficient solutions.

• Solid software engineering foundations and deep technical proficiency in algorithms, with a proven track record of designing and delivering high-quality solutions.

• Experience troubleshooting complex issues.

• A high level of autonomy, owning projects from beginning to end. The distributed nature of the company offers freedom to work when and how you see fit, but also requires team members to work independently, and reach out for help when stuck.

• You've used several data storage technologies like Elasticsearch, Solr, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, or Cassandra and have some idea how they work and why they work that way.

Bonus Points

• You've built things with Elasticsearch before.

• You have experience designing, leading and owning cross-functional initiatives.

• You've worked with open source projects and are familiar with different styles of source control workflow and continuous integration.

• You have past working experience with OS or cloud service development.