Senior Software Engineer - Streams - Observability

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 Observability Streams team at Elastic is building Elastic's unified data pipeline - the layer that connects where your data comes from to where it lands, with full control over how it's processed and routed along the way. Whether you're collecting metrics from cloud accounts, shipping logs from agents, or routing traces to different destinations, Streams is what ties it all together.

The Streams Backend team is responsible for the backend services powering this pipeline, ensuring data is routed, processed, and delivered efficiently and reliably at scale. We also own Logstash, the open-source streaming ETL tool (and the “L” in the “ELK stack”) trusted by enterprises worldwide to move and transform data, and we are regular contributors to the OpenTelemetry Collector.

As a Senior software engineer on the Streams Backend team,you will help drive the design and development of new features across the Streams Backend service and Logstash, contribute to the OpenTelemetry Collector, and support our users and enterprise customers.

Our team is distributed across the globe, and we communicate mostly through Slack, GitHub, email and Zoom.

What You Will Be Doing

Designing and implementing new features for Logstash and its plugins in Java and JRuby.

Designing, building, and operating core backend services for the Streams program in Golang.

Adding new features, and making contributions to the Open Telemetry Collector in Golang.

Solving hard distributed systems problems at scale.

Maintaining, updating and improving existing code and dependencies while ensuring automated test coverage.

Engaging with multiple public GitHub repositories and community forums.

Providing Pull Request reviews and guidance to your peers.

Collaborating with other teams to drive product goals.

Working together with the support organization to help our customers, which will also include participating in an on-call rotation.

What You Bring

Ability to work in a remote-first, highly distributed environment, with top-notch verbal and written communication.

Proficient analytical, problem solving, debugging skills and ability to find efficient solutions.

Critical thinking, positivity, autonomy and adaptability.

Expertise in at least one of Java, Golang and Ruby, and willingness to learn and work with the others and ability to adapt to regularly working in different codebases.

Clear written communication and the ability to work proficiently in a remote-first, highly distributed team.

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

Bonus Points

Familiarity with observability tools and concepts (tracing, metrics, logging), especially experience with or interest in OpenTelemetry

Hands-on experience with Docker and Kubernetes.

JRuby development

Open source software development

Knowledge of stream processing platforms (such as Kafka), database technologies (e.g., Postgres or MySQL) and network technologies (e.g., TCP, UDP and HTTP).

Exposure to the Elastic stack.

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