Senior Java Engineer - Elasticsearch Core/Infra

About the role

Elastic is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join its Elasticsearch team and make sure the shared platform functionality of Elasticsearch is easy to use, performant, maintainable and secure. The team builds foundational infrastructure and shared services, settings and scripting, and provides logging and telemetry so Elasticsearch is observable. It also owns orchestration of Elasticsearch in serverless, CI/CD workflows and delivery to customers on serverless, cloud and on-premise platforms. The engineer is a strong individual contributor who also contributes to and leads cross-team projects.

Key responsibilities

• Contribute to large projects that evolve the core infrastructure of Elasticsearch.
• Improve developer productivity by finding automation opportunities and integrating agentic apps into development workflows.
• Design and implement new horizontally-scalable features and APIs.
• Solve difficult issues, including performance and concurrency problems, and propose solutions.
• Improve operation and observability of Elasticsearch cloud systems.
• Collaborate openly with the ES team, Elastic users and other open source projects.
• Support support engineers with hard problems and own operational investigations end to end until issues are resolved.

Required profile

• Experience crafting APIs and reasoning through trade-offs.
• Strong core Java skills, including low-level topics such as concurrency, parallelism and classloaders.
• Experience leading large-scale projects across engineering teams and owning projects from start to finish.
• Proven track record of using AI to speed up development, debug complex systems and optimise code.
• Able to work autonomously in a distributed team and collaborate across functions and teams.

Required skills

• Algorithms and data structures.
• CI/CD systems and practices (Buildkite, Argo CD, GitOps).
• Bonus points: JDK internals, OpenTelemetry, Go, containers and Kubernetes, Java build tools (Gradle preferred), and experience in a platform or developer productivity team.

What we offer

• Base salary only, with no variable component; typical range €67,000 to €106,000.
• Flexible locations and schedules, generous vacation days and parental leave of at least 16 weeks.
• Health coverage for you and your family in many locations.
• Volunteer time and a matching donation program.