Tech Lead, Agent Framework - Observability

Elastic's Streams program is the unified platform for getting data into Elasticsearch, from edge collection all the way through cloud processing. At the edge, Elastic Agent and Beats are how data leaves customer infrastructure. This is the tech lead position for the Agent Framework team: you will own the architecture, set the technical direction, and be the primary decision-maker for how Elastic's agent layer evolves to support the Streams model.

Responsibilities

• Design a scalable and capable architecture for the agent layer, evaluate and implement new technologies to boost system performance, and lead architectural reviews and discussions to drive decision-making.
• Provide technical guidance and support to team members, conduct code reviews, and lead by example, demonstrating engineering best practices and setting high standards for quality.
• Engage with stakeholders to gather requirements and collaborate with product management to prioritize features.
• Facilitate collaboration across teams, identify risks that could hinder project success, and adjust plans in response to changing priorities.

Qualifications

• Proven experience as a technical lead or principal engineer on an agent, daemon, or systems-level software project at scale, managing distributed deployments, versioning, and backward compatibility.
• Deep knowledge of observability data collection: metrics, logs, traces, and the protocols that carry them (OTLP, Prometheus Remote Write, syslog, and similar).
• Solid background in Go, Elastic Agent and Beats are primarily Go.
• Experience designing management and control planes for distributed software, particularly protocol-driven approaches like OpAMP.
• Track record of leading large, multi-team technical initiatives from ambiguous design space to shipped software.
• Comfortable with the full arc of a technical decision: writing the design doc, socializing it across stakeholders, building consensus, and holding the line on what matters.
• Great written communication, producing design docs and ADRs that others trust and reference long after the decision is made.
• Bonus: direct experience with Elastic Agent, Fleet, Beats, or OpenTelemetry collector internals, cross-platform testing across Linux, Windows, macOS, containers, and Kubernetes, pipeline execution models and processing languages, infrastructure-as-code tooling for agent deployment, and open source contributions in the observability ecosystem.