Senior Java Engineer

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 are on the lookout for a Senior Software Engineer to join our Elasticsearch team and focus on ensuring that the shared platform functionalities of Elasticsearch are easy to use, performant, maintainable, and secure. The team's mission is to create foundational infrastructure and shared functionality that enables engineers to develop, extend, and support Elasticsearch.

What You Will Be Doing:

• Contributing to large, impactful projects that evolve the core infrastructure that underpins Elasticsearch.
• Making Elasticsearch developers more productive by identifying and developing opportunities for automation, and integrating agentic apps into development workflows.
• Designing and implementing new horizontally-scalable features and APIs in Elasticsearch.
• Solving difficult issues, including performance or concurrency issues, and proposing solutions.
• Improving operation and observability of Elasticsearch cloud systems.
• Collaborating in the open with the ES team, Elastic users, and other supporting open source projects.
• 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:

• Experience crafting APIs and the ability to reason through tradeoffs.
• Proficient in algorithms and data structures.
• Strong skills in core Java and conversant in the standard library of data structures and concurrency constructs, as well as newer language features.
• Experience with low-level Java such as concurrency, parallelism, classloaders, etc.
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD systems and practices (Buildkite, Argo CD, GitOps etc).
• Experience leading large scale projects across engineering teams.
• Willingness to dive into new issues and ask for help when you need it.
• Able to own projects from beginning to end, covering both technical design and working with others to develop needed components.
• Proven track record of using AI to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimise code, while still owning the final outcomes.
• Ability to collaborate across functions and teams and seamlessly transition between different projects, codebases, or teams based on business priorities.
• Can work autonomously, drive decisions and results in a distributed team by leveraging asynchronous, direct, and transparent communication.

Bonus Points:

• Knowledge of JDK internals: modules, the Java memory model, garbage collection, database load, caching techniques, etc.
• Experience with observability and telemetry solutions, particularly OpenTelemetry.
• Knowledge of Go.
• Knowledge of containers and Kubernetes.
• Knowledge of Java build tools (Gradle, Maven, etc), with a strong preference for Gradle experience.
• Experience working in a platform team or developer productivity team.

Compensation for this role is in the form of base salary. This role does not have a variable compensation component. At Elastic, our compensation philosophy aims to provide fair, competitive and transparent remuneration.