Principal Software Engineer in Katowice

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.

We're looking for a Principal Software Engineer to join the Elasticsearch - Search team. This globally-distributed team of expert engineers focuses on delivering a robust and feature-rich search experience, including contributing to improving the search experience in Lucene. This is a principal software engineering role that focuses on enhancing the vector similarity search functionality within Elasticsearch, covering the design and implementation of new vector search features, enhancements to existing vector search functionality, and resolving bugs.

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 and intuitive 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

• Lead initiatives within Elasticsearch to produce an industry-leading vector database offering, supplying unparalleled speed and relevance in search.
• Contribute to Elasticsearch full time, building new search features and fixing intriguing bugs, 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.
• Work with a globally distributed team of experienced engineers focused on the vector search capabilities of Elasticsearch.
• Be an expert on how Elasticsearch implements vector similarity in support of search relevance.
• Work with community members from all over the world on issues and pull requests.
• Write idiomatic modern Java -- Elasticsearch is 99.8% Java!

What You Bring Along

• Implemented novel techniques in vector similarity on a search platform with a large user base or progressed the field of academic research in vector similarity information retrieval.
• Professional experience with vector similarity and vector databases, using HNSW, IVF, or other relevant algorithms and libraries on search platforms at scale.
• Strong skills in core Java and conversant in the standard library of data structures and concurrency constructs.
• Work with a high level of autonomy, guiding projects from beginning to end.
• Comfortable developing collaboratively, giving and receiving feedback on code and approaches.
• Experience with several data storage technologies like Elasticsearch, Solr, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, or Cassandra.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
• Proven track record of using AI to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimize code.
• Ability to collaborate across functions and teams and transition between different projects based on business priorities.
• Drive decisions and results in a distributed team through asynchronous, direct, and transparent communication.

Bonus points

• Built things with Elasticsearch before.
• Worked with open source projects and familiar with different styles of source control workflow and continuous integration.
• Experience with data storage technology.