Senior Engineering Manager - Agents and Context - Platform

About the role

Elastic's Chat team, part of the Agents and Context group, builds the conversational and agentic platform that lets customers chat with and operate on their own data in Elasticsearch. As Senior Engineering Manager you will lead a distributed team of about 12 engineers, acting as its primary project manager alongside the Product Manager and Technical Lead. The role is people and delivery leadership in a fast-moving, distributed environment.

Key responsibilities

• Own delivery of the Chat roadmap: break it into milestones, anticipate risk and keep the team shipping predictably.
• Run hiring end to end: job descriptions, interview loops, sourcing with Recruiting and onboarding.
• Coach and develop engineers at every level, with regular 1:1s, clear expectations and honest feedback.
• Run performance management consistently, including promotions, development plans and resolving underperformance.
• Partner with the Tech Lead and PM on roadmap and priorities, and with data science, UX and other Agents and Context teams on shared primitives and quality signals.
• Build and improve team processes (planning, async communication, release and on-call practice) through consensus and clear writing.
• Represent the team to leadership and stakeholders.

Required profile

• Proven track record as an established engineering manager, including hiring, coaching, promotions and performance management.
• Track record delivering large, multi-team software initiatives in a distributed, async-first environment, including team processes.
• Previous hands-on software engineering experience as a senior contributor, with enough technical depth to understand a TypeScript/Node/React stack, an Elasticsearch-backed system and how LLM-powered products are built and evaluated.
• Familiarity with LLM applications, ideally including RAG, agents, tool use, evaluation and prompt and context engineering.
• Comfortable with ambiguity, able to set and communicate priorities, and genuinely interested in what makes an agentic product good for users.
• Excellent written and verbal communication; clear, concise long-form writing is how the team works.
• Direct, kind, calm and empathetic, holding people accountable and navigating hard conversations without drama.

Required skills

• Understanding of a TypeScript/Node/React stack and an Elasticsearch-backed system.
• Experience with Elasticsearch, Kibana, search and information retrieval, or open source communities is a plus.

What we offer

• Base salary of EUR 80,400 to 127,200, with no variable component.
• Health coverage for you and your family in many locations.
• Flexible locations and schedules for many roles.
• Generous number of vacation days each year.
• Matching of up to $2,000 (or local currency equivalent) for financial donations and service, and up to 40 hours per year for volunteer projects.
• Minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave.