Senior Engineer, Competitive Benchmarking & Performance

About the role

Elastic, the Search AI Company, is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to lead competitive benchmarking initiatives within the Elasticsearch Performance team. The engineer builds representative workloads, automates reproducible experiments and investigates how Elasticsearch compares with alternative systems, identifying performance strengths, gaps and trade-offs. Technical publishing is a shared responsibility alongside engineering and content partners.

Key responsibilities

• Own prioritized competitive benchmarking initiatives across search, vector and hybrid retrieval, and analytical and observability workloads.
• Build and maintain automated benchmark harnesses, datasets, query sets and load profiles reflecting real-world usage, including concurrent ingestion and querying.
• Design fair comparisons with documented system versions, configurations, tuning decisions, resource budgets and functional differences.
• Evaluate latency distributions, throughput, resource consumption and cost efficiency, measuring retrieval performance at comparable recall or relevance targets.
• Adapt and extend tools such as Elasticsearch Rally, ClickBench and vector search benchmark frameworks.
• Use profiling, system metrics and controlled experiments to investigate performance differences and validate improvements with engineering teams.
• Evaluate self-managed and managed cloud deployments, including serverless offerings, accounting for scaling and service constraints.
• Publish reproducible benchmark artifacts and technical reports with engineering and content partners.
• Work with product management to prioritize benchmark coverage and turn findings into product improvements.

Required profile

• Solid software engineering skills, with experience building maintainable automation and analysis tools in Python or another relevant language.
• Hands-on experience evaluating and diagnosing performance in distributed systems, databases or search infrastructure.
• Depth in at least one area (search, vector retrieval, analytical databases or observability systems) and the ability to learn unfamiliar systems.
• Experience designing representative datasets and workloads, including query patterns, concurrency and ingestion behavior.
• Sound experimental judgment, including repeated measurements, variability analysis, warm-up and cache effects.
• Experience building reproducible test environments and documenting configurations, procedures and results.
• Clear technical writing and communication skills, and solid collaboration skills.

Required skills

• Python or another relevant programming language
• Bonus: Elasticsearch, Lucene, Rally, ClickBench or vector search benchmark frameworks
• Bonus: measuring retrieval quality alongside latency, throughput and resource usage
• Bonus: cloud performance and cost analysis, including autoscaling and serverless systems

What we offer

• Base salary of EUR 67,000 to 106,000, 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.
• Up to 40 hours per year for volunteer projects.
• Minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave.