Principal Java Engineer - Elasticsearch Distributed Systems

About the role

Elastic is looking for a Principal Software Engineer to join its Elasticsearch - Distributed Systems team. The role focuses on how Elasticsearch delivers scale, performance and resilience, especially in the context of its Serverless offering, and tackles deep distributed systems challenges such as how nodes in a cluster communicate and how data is indexed, allocated and managed across nodes.

Key responsibilities

• Design, build and operate core parts of the next-generation Serverless Elasticsearch offering
• Improve components that support concurrent and consistent indexing across multiple machines
• Maintain the cluster coordination system so performance stays high despite nodes joining and leaving and data moving around, while preserving safety and liveness
• Extend the limits on shards, nodes and petabytes that Elasticsearch can handle
• Analyze performance and concurrency issues and propose solutions
• Support support engineers with hard problems and own operational investigations end to end until issues are resolved

Required profile

• Deep background in distributed systems and consensus algorithms
• Experience building large-scale distributed systems rather than relying on off-the-shelf services
• Experience building and debugging complex features with broad impact across multiple machines
• Able to own projects from start to finish, including technical design and collaboration with others
• Experience managing projects involving multiple engineers
• Proven track record of using AI to speed up development, debug complex systems and optimize code
• Collaborates across functions and teams and works autonomously in a distributed team

Required skills

• Core Java and the standard library of data structures and concurrency constructs
• Algorithms
• Bonus points: data stores, search, analytics, Lucene, strong knowledge of the JDK, and asynchronous event-driven frameworks such as Netty

What we offer

• Base salary only, with no variable component; typical range €80,400 to €127,200
• 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 donations and service, and up to 40 hours per year for volunteering
• Parental leave of at least 16 weeks