Principal Software Engineer - Builder Experience - Platform Engineering Productivity

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

Join our Platform Engineering Productivity team as a Principal Software Engineer. We’re looking for a systems-minded engineer who is curious by nature, stays current with AI and emerging tools, and takes ownership not only of what the team builds, but also how the team works.

In this role, you will help ensure Elastic products are delivered to customers with high quality while making the software development and release process more efficient for engineers across the organization. If you think systematically, thrive in ambiguity, and enjoy enabling teams to build and ship software effectively at scale, we’d love to hear from you.

What You Will Be Doing

As part of the Engineering Productivity team, you will build and improve the frameworks, reusable components, and operational guidelines that help teams own the full software development lifecycle for their services. You may work across a wide range of initiatives, including:

Improving CI infrastructure reliability and efficiency.

Building and managing systems that produce releasable artifacts.

Enabling ephemeral developer environments.

Defining and enforcing release quality gates.

Developing tooling and infrastructure for product deployment and release.

Review code to uphold engineering standards, improve performance, and catch defects early.

Collaborating with engineering and product to align on requirements, testing strategy, and delivery goals.

Drive clear technical communication across teams and projects.

Create and maintain high-quality technical documentation for systems, processes, and architectural decisions.

Mentoring engineers and fostering a collaborative culture around code quality and best practices.

What You Bring

Solid understanding of the full software development lifecycle, including build, package, test, release, and quality strategy.

Deep experience in one or more programming languages such as Python, Go, Bash, Java, or Scala.

Experience with CI/CD systems, GIT and modern development and release practices.

Experience with cloud infrastructure and developer platforms, including tools such as Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker, configuration management tools, and major cloud providers.

Experience designing scalable systems and improving developer productivity through tooling and automation.

Ability to move fluidly across projects, priorities, and evolving team structures.

Hands-on AI fluency, including integrating LLM APIs into production workflows and applying prompt engineering to domain-specific problems.

A track record of improving engineering practices such as code review quality, standards, and team efficiency.

Excellent written and verbal technical communication skills.

Enthusiasm for working with a globally distributed team and comfort in navigating ambiguity.

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. Salary ranges are established based on a combination of external market benchmarks, internal pay equity considerations, and the responsibilities and complexity associated with each role. This approach helps ensure consistency across comparable roles while remaining competitive within the relevant labour markets.

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