Principal Software Engineer I - CI/CD - 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

The Platform Engineering Productivity team operates the CI, CD, and Release infrastructure for the company. We ensure developers can efficiently and safely deploy changes across our various environments and at scale. In an age of AI, the landscape is evolving rapidly from scaling needs to, more than ever, securing our supply chain. There are interesting challenges to tackle.

We're looking for a proactive systems thinker who delivers on business-driven projects while identifying and driving the work that keeps our infrastructure ahead before scaling and security challenges become problems. If you're energized by work that makes every engineering team at Elastic ship faster and more securely, we'd love to hear from you.

What You Will Be Doing

Define the roadmap and technical vision for CI/CD, from problem identification through org-wide adoption.

Identify where CI/CD is a bottleneck, a source of friction, or a security risk before it becomes an incident, and drive the remediation rather than waiting to be assigned it.

Design and enforce release gates covering supply chain integrity, artifact provenance, and release readiness, built to scale across teams without becoming a tax on engineering velocity.

Direct engineers on your team through complex, multi-quarter projects: break down the architecture, assign the work, and own the outcome even when the execution is distributed.

Drive clear technical communication and alignment across teams, and produce high-quality documentation for systems, processes, and architectural decisions.

Serve as Incident Commander on high-severity supply chain or release incidents, and use each incident as a forcing function for structural improvements.

Raise the engineering bar across the org through code review, mentorship, design review, and by setting standards others adopt voluntarily.

Remain hands-on at the right depth: you'll review code, prototype approaches, and debug production issues, but your primary leverage at this level is through the work of others, not your own output.

What You Bring

Deep expertise in CI/CD and what it takes to harden a release pipeline against supply chain attacks.

Strong debugging instincts across the full pipeline stack: you trace failures from test runner to artifact store to cluster deployment without needing a specialist for each layer.

Hands-on with CI infrastructure (Buildkite, GitHub Actions, or equivalent), GitOps/ArgoCD, and Kubernetes.

You use AI to accelerate your own work and your team's and you understand AI's impact on supply chain security and scale.

A track record of multi-quarter, cross-org ownership: you've identified the right problem, designed the solution, and gotten organizations that didn't report to you to change how they work.

The judgment to push back on a prescribed plan when it's the wrong call, and the credibility to get alignment on a better approach.

Experience directing the work of other engineers toward outcomes not just collaborating, but breaking down complex problems into executable work and holding the outcome.

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