Principal Software Engineer - Performance Tuning - 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

Elasticsearch powers search, observability, and AI retrieval (RAG) for the world's largest organizations. We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer to join the Elasticsearch Performance team. In this role, you will lead architectural and code-level performance engineering initiatives. Your goal is to drive the continuous optimization and predictability of Elasticsearch performance, partnering with area-specific teams to unlock the full potential of our software.

What You Will Be Doing

Owning core performance engineering initiatives from architecture to production, focusing on the delivery of high-impact optimizations. Leading the technical design, plan, and execution for major architectural and code-level performance improvements.

Developing foundational performance models and methodologies for complex, distributed systems.

Driving optimization strategies to ensure Elasticsearch remains performant, predictable, and scalable in diverse environments.

Profiling and analyzing system behavior to identify bottlenecks in logging, metrics, vector search, and ES|QL.

Ensuring robust performance benchmarks and regression detection for both stateful and stateless (Serverless) architectures.

Collaborating across the company to embed performance-first thinking into new features from the outset.

Drive automation efforts by designin