Principal Software Engineer I - Distributed Systems - Elasticsearch

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

We are on the lookout for a Principal Software Engineer I to join our Elasticsearch - Distributed Systems team and focus on how Elasticsearch provides scale, performance, and resilience. This team owns how nodes in an Elasticsearch cluster communicate, and how data are indexed, allocated, and replicated across nodes.

What You Will Be Doing

Improving Elasticsearch’s components that support concurrent and consistent indexing across multiple machines.

Maintaining our cluster coordination system to keep performance high even though nodes come and go from the cluster and data moves around, while maintaining the safety and liveness properties of the system as a whole.

Pushing the limits on the number of shards, nodes, and petabytes that Elasticsearch can handle today

Looking into all kinds of issues, including performance or concurrency issues, and proposing solutions.

Supporting our support engineers with the harder problems.

What You Bring

A strong background in distributed systems and consensus algorithms.

You have strong skills in core Java and are conversant in the standard library of data structures and concurrency constructs, as well as newer language features.

You have a deep technical proficiency in algorithms.

You have shown your ability to understand and work on complex, highly distributed systems.

You demonstrate the ability to build and debug features with a broad impact, running on multiple machines.

You are able to own projects from beginning to end. This covers both technical design and working with others to develop needed components.

You have experience managing projects involving multiple engineers.

Bonus Points

Data stores

Search, analytics, Lucene

Strong knowledge of the JDK

Asynchronous event-driven network frameworks such as Netty

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.

The final compensation offered within the applicable range will be determined based on several objective factors, including relevant professional experience, level of skills and expertise, alignment with the role requirements, and the overall scope and complexity of the position.

The typical starting salary range for this role is

€67.000—€106.000 EUR

Additional Information - We Take Care of Our People

As a distributed company, diversity drives our identity. Whether you’re looking to launch a new career or grow an existing one, Elastic is the type of company where you can balance great work with great life. Your age is only a number. It doesn’t matter if you’re just out of college or your children are; we need you for what you can do.

We strive to have parity of benefits across regions and while regulations differ from place to place, we believe taking care of our people is the right thing to do.

Competitive pay based on the work you do here and not your previous salary

Health coverage