Backend Engineer
Senior Software Engineer - Storage Engine - Elasticsearch
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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:
We're looking for a
Senior Software Engineer
to join the
Elasticsearch - Storage Engine team
. This globally distributed, fully remote team of experienced engineers develops core storage and query technologies for observability workloads, including improving storage efficiency, advancing ES|QL query processing and performance, and optimizing data layouts for object storage.
This role is responsible for designing, implementing, and optimizing Elasticsearch's core storage and query engine. The ideal candidate has experience building high-performance, scalable database, search, or distributed systems, with a strong focus on storage, indexing, query execution, and performance optimization.
Our company is distributed by intention. We hire the best engineers we can find wherever they are, whoever they are. We collaborate across continents every day over email, GitHub, Zoom, and Slack. At our best, we write fast, scalable, intuitive and high-quality software. We believe that the best way to do that is to empower individual engineers, code review every change, decide big things by consensus, and strive for incremental improvements.
What You Will Be Doing:
- Lead the architectural evolution of core storage engine components, continuously identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks in indexing layouts, serialization formats, and resource utilization.
- Lead cross organizational initiatives to drive and build industry-leading observability solutions.
- Work with a globally distributed team of experienced engineers focused on the logs and metrics capabilities of Elasticsearch.
- Drive continuous operational and system improvements by introducing best practices for clean coding standards, demystifying complex system behaviors, untangling complexity to bring architectural clarity across the platform.
- Serve as a subject matter expert (SME) across key areas of Elasticsearch, acting as a trusted technical advisor and mentor to the wider engineering organization.
- Work with a global community to triage, resolve, and review issues and pull requests, collaborating with domain experts as needed.
- Write idiomatic modern Java -- Elasticsearch is 99.8% Java!
What You Bring:
- You possess the ability to collaborate across functions and teams and seamlessly transition between different projects, codebases, or teams based on business priorities.
- You work autonomously and can drive decisions and results in a distributed team by leveraging asynchronous, direct, and transparent communication.
- You have a proven track record of using AI to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimize code, while still owning the final outcomes.
- You bring a prompt-engineering mindset to know how to leverage AI agents effectively, using sound engineering judgment to validate results and recognize its limitations.
- You have implemented novel techniques to efficiently index, store, and query time-series or logs data.
- You have experience with one or more data storage technologies like Elasticsearch, Solr, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, or Prometheus and have some idea how they work and why they work that way.
- You have strong core Java skills, a deep understanding of its concurrency primitives, with a proven ability to design and optimize efficient data structures and algorithms.
- You excel in a collaborative environment, actively participate in technical discussions, and work effectively across distributed teams. Because it's the best way we know how to build software.
- You have excellent verbal and written communication skills and collaborate with respect, empathy, and professionalism in a distributed team.
Bonus Points:
- You've built things with Elasticsearch before.
- You've worked with open source projects and are familiar with different styles of source control workflow and continuous integration.
- You've worked on data storage technology.
- You have experience designing, leading, and owning cross-functional initiatives.
- You have past working experience with database, search engine, OS, or cloud service development.
Additional Information - We Take Care of Our People:
As a distributed company, diversity drives our identity. Whether you’re looking to launch a new career or grow an existing one, Elastic is the type of company where you can balance great work with great life. Your age is only a number. It doesn’t matter if you’re just out of college or your children are; we need you for what you can do.
We strive to have parity of benefits across regions, and while regulations differ from place to place, we believe taking care of our people is the right thing to do.
- Competitive pay based on the work you do here and not your previous salary
- Health coverage for you and your family in many locations
- Ability to craft your calendar with flexible locations and schedules for many roles
- Generous number of vacation days each year
- Increase your impact - We match up to $2000 (or local currency equivalent) for financial donations and service
- Up to 40 hours each year to use toward volunteer projects you love
- Embracing parenthood with a minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave
Security & Privacy Responsibilities:
Take ownership of protecting the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of organizational data and systems by following applicable privacy and security policies, standards, and procedures. Ensure that all individual contributions follow Elastic’s Secure Software Development Framework (SSDF). Proactively participate in mandatory role-based training to ensure personal technical execution consistently aligns with the highest standards of data protection, data privacy, and system resilience.
Different people approach problems differently. We need that. Elastic is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to creating an inclusive culture that celebrates different perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, ethnicity, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, disability status, or any other basis protected by federal, state or local law, ordinance or regulation.
We welcome individuals with disabilities and strive to create an accessible and inclusive experience for all individuals. To request an accommodation during the application or the recruiting process, please email candidate_accessibility@elastic.co. We will reply to your request within 24 business hours of submission.
Applicants have rights under Federal Employment Laws and can view the following posters linked below:
Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) Poster
Employee Polygraph Protection Act (EPPA) Poster
Elasticsearch develops and distributes technology and information that is subject to U.S. and other countries’ export controls and licensing requirements for individuals who are located in or are nationals of the following sanctioned countries and regions: Belarus, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, or Russia, including the Ukrainian territories annexed by Russia (The Crimea region of Ukraine, The Donetsk People's Republic (DNR), The Luhansk People's Republic (LNR), Kherson or Zaporizhzhia). If you are located in or are a national of one of the listed countries or regions, an export license may be required as a condition of your employment in this role. Please note that national origin and/or nationality do not affect eligibility for employment with Elastic.
Please see here for our Privacy Statement.
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 a combination of external market benchmarks, internal pay equity considerations, and the responsibilities and complexity associated with each role. This approach helps ensure consistency across comparable roles while remaining competitive within the relevant labour markets.
The final compensation offered within the applicable range will be determined based on several objective factors, including relevant professional experience, level of skills and expertise, alignment with the role requirements, and the overall scope and complexity of the position.
The typical starting salary range for this role is:
€61.100—€96.600 EUR
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