Senior Java Developer - Core/Infra - Elasticsearch

Elastic is looking for a Senior Software Developer to join the Elasticsearch Core/Infra team, ensuring that the shared platform functionality of Elasticsearch is easy to use, performant, maintainable, and secure. The team builds the foundational infrastructure that lets engineers develop, extend, and support Elasticsearch: common services, settings, scripting via the Painless language, plugin extensibility, logging and telemetry, orchestration of Elasticsearch in serverless, and the CI/CD workflows that deliver Elasticsearch to serverless, cloud, and on-premise customers alike. You will be a strong individual contributor who also leads cross-team projects, working at a low level of abstraction while communicating technical concepts across a variety of collaborators.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to large, impactful projects that evolve the core infrastructure underpinning Elasticsearch.
• Make Elasticsearch developers more productive by identifying automation opportunities and integrating agentic apps into development workflows.
• Design and implement new horizontally-scalable features and APIs in Elasticsearch.
• Solve difficult issues, including performance and concurrency problems, and propose solutions.
• Improve operation and observability of Elasticsearch cloud systems.
• Collaborate in the open with the Elasticsearch team, Elastic users, and supporting open source projects.
• Support the support engineers with the harder problems, and own operational investigations end-to-end until performance or stability issues are resolved.

Qualifications

• Experience crafting APIs and the ability to reason through tradeoffs, with proficiency in algorithms and data structures.
• Strong core Java skills, including low-level topics such as concurrency, parallelism, and classloaders.
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD systems and practices (Buildkite, Argo CD, GitOps, and similar).
• Experience leading large-scale projects across engineering teams, plus willingness to dive into new issues and ask for help when needed.
• Able to own projects from beginning to end, from technical design through collaborative delivery.
• A proven track record of using AI to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimize code, while still owning the final outcomes.
• Bonus: JDK internals (modules, memory model, garbage collection), OpenTelemetry, Go, containers and Kubernetes, Java build tools with a preference for Gradle, and platform or developer productivity team experience.