Senior Java Software Engineer - Search Inference - Platform

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 Senior Java Developer to join our Elasticsearch team and drive our work on the Inference API in Elasticsearch.

The Elasticsearch Inference API is the integration layer between Elasticsearch and external machine learning services including Elastic's own Elastic Inference Service (EIS), third-party providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, Cohere, Google), and self-hosted models. It powers features like semantic search, reranking, and generative AI across Elastic Cloud and in hosted environments.

You'll maintain and develop the plugin framework and REST API with your work spanning protocol design, streaming, async execution, billing integration, and with a tight collaboration with the wider inference team and the Kibana team.

What You Will Be Doing

Build and maintain integrations with internal systems and external inference providers, including schema negotiation, streaming (SSE), and error normalisation

Contribute to the inference plugin's internal architecture: task settings, chunking strategies, rate limiting, and provider-level configuration

Review open source contributions to the codebase and work with third party engineers to ensure their contributions meet our technology standards

Participate in on-call rotation for inference-related incidents

Write thorough tests: unit tests using ESTestCase, YAML-based REST integration tests, and rolling-upgrade tests

What You Bring

5+ years of production Java experience, with experience contributing to a large, established Java codebase. You know core Java and are conversant in the standard library of data structures and concurrency constructs, as well as newer language features.

Experience crafting ergonomic APIs and the ability to reason through tradeoffs.

Experience with low-level Java such as concurrency, parallelism, classloaders, etc.

You have a proven track record of using AI to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimize code, while still owning the final outcomes.

You possess the ability to collaborate across functions and teams and seamlessly transition between different projects, codebases, or teams based on business priorities

You 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 ML systems

Contributions to and ownership of open source projects

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. 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 factor