Principal Software Engineer - Search Scaling - Elasticsearch

ABOUT THE ROLE We are seeking a highly experienced Principal Software Engineer to join our Elasticsearch - Search Scaling team. This team is responsible for delivering a robust and feature-rich search experience, including improving the search experience in Lucene. As a Principal Software Engineer, you will define, direct, and build the next generation of Elasticsearch capabilities, providing technical vision and direction for Elasticsearch's core search infrastructure. WHAT YOU'LL DO As a full-time Elasticsearch contributor, you will define, lead, and contribute to the evolution of core search and indexing capabilities. You will research advances in search infrastructure, data structures, and retrieval algorithms to ensure we're building the most efficient and powerful foundations for our users. You will work closely with our partners and product teams to understand their needs and help shape the long-term technical vision for search at Elastic. You will bring your past experience with large-scale search systems to drive an innovative roadmap for Elasticsearch's indexing, query execution, and relevance layers. WHAT YOU'LL NEED To be successful in this role, you will need: - Experience leading technical projects in the search infrastructure and distributed systems space, with proven knowledge in building and operating sophisticated search platforms and engineering robust, high-performance software systems. - Experience mentoring expert engineers, providing both technical and professional guidance. - Experience defining a long-term technical vision for a core search or retrieval system, working across teams and organizations to collaboratively shape the technical roadmap. - Hands-on experience with search and indexing technologies such as Elasticsearch, Lucene, or Solr. - Strong skills in core Java and familiarity with advanced data structures and concurrency constructs, as well as newer language features like lambdas. - Ability to work with a high level of autonomy, tackling projects and guiding them from concept to completion, including both technical design and collaboration with other engineers to develop the necessary components. - Experience with large-scale data or search systems such as Elasticsearch, Lucene, Solr, or distributed storage engines, and an understanding of how they work and why they work that way. - Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to collaborate across distributed teams. WHY REMOTE Our company is distributed by intention, and 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, and 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. BENEFITS We offer a competitive base salary, as well as a comprehensive health plan, parental leave, education stipend, life insurance, and flexible schedule.