Principal Software Developer (Storage Engine, Elasticsearch)

• We’re looking for a Principal Software Developer 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 driving the technical vision, architecture, and design of Elasticsearch’s core storage and query engine
• Our company is distributed by intention. We hire the best developers 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, and intuitive 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
• 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!

Benefits

• Toast to your health: Fully paid health coverage for you and your family, in many locations.
• Craft your calendar: Flexible location and schedule for most roles.
• Create space for you: Distributed by design workforce, plus generous number of vacation days each year.
• Embrace parenthood: Minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave, plus generous family formation benefits.
• Give back your time: 40 hours each year to use toward volunteering with organizations and causes you’re passionate about.
• Amplify your impact: Double your charitable giving — we match donations up to $1500 USD (or local currency equivalent).

• The ideal candidate has a proven track record of designing high-performance, scalable database or search engine technologies, along with the ability to drive technical initiatives across organizations
• You possess the ability to collaborate across functions and teams and seamlessly transition between different projects, codebases, or teams based on business priorities
• 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 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 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 work autonomously and can drive decisions and results in a distributed team by leveraging asynchronous, direct, and transparent communication
• You have excellent verbal and written communication skills and collaborate with respect, empathy, and professionalism in a distributed team
• 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 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 have implemented novel techniques to efficiently index, store, and query time-series or logs data
• You’ve worked with open source projects and are familiar with different styles of source control workflow and continuous integration
• You’ve built things with Elasticsearch before
• 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