Principal Software Engineer - Search Infra - Elasticsearch

Elastic is hiring a Principal Software Engineer for the Elasticsearch Search Infra team, a globally distributed group focused on delivering a robust, feature-rich search experience, including improving the search experience in Lucene. This role provides technical vision and direction for Elasticsearch's core search infrastructure: indexing, retrieval, and relevance. It calls for deep expertise in search internals and strong cross-team collaboration, in a company that empowers individual engineers, code reviews every change, and decides big things by consensus.

Responsibilities

• Define, lead, and contribute to the evolution of core search and indexing capabilities as a full-time Elasticsearch contributor.
• Research advances in search infrastructure, data structures, and retrieval algorithms to build the most efficient and powerful foundations for users.
• Work closely with partners and product teams to understand their needs and shape the long-term technical vision for search at Elastic.
• Drive an innovative roadmap for Elasticsearch's indexing, query execution, and relevance layers, informed by past experience with large-scale search systems.
• Act as the go-to authority in several areas of Elasticsearch, continuously improving them through your insights and instincts.

Qualifications

• Experience leading technical projects in the search infrastructure and distributed systems space, with proven knowledge of building and operating sophisticated, high-performance search platforms.
• Experience mentoring expert engineers, providing both technical and professional guidance.
• Experience defining a long-term technical vision for a core search or retrieval system, and working across teams and organizations to shape the roadmap collaboratively.
• Hands-on experience with search and indexing technologies such as Elasticsearch, Lucene, or Solr.
• Strong skills in core Java, including advanced data structures, concurrency constructs, and newer language features, plus a strong drive to optimize algorithms and search data structures.
• Able to work with high autonomy, guiding projects from concept to completion across technical design and collaboration.
• Excellent verbal and written communication, with a supportive, empathetic approach to distributed teamwork.
• A proven track record of using AI to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimize code, while still owning the final outcomes.
• Bonus: prior Elasticsearch builds, information retrieval theory, and open source workflow experience.