Senior Software Developer - Storage Engine - Elasticsearch

Join the Elasticsearch Storage Engine team, a globally distributed, fully remote team developing core storage and query technologies for observability workloads: improving storage efficiency, advancing ES|QL query processing and performance, and optimizing data layouts for object storage. This role is responsible for designing, implementing, and optimizing Elasticsearch's core storage and query engine, and suits an engineer with experience building high-performance database, search, or distributed systems with a strong focus on storage, indexing, query execution, and performance.

Responsibilities

• 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 build industry-leading observability solutions.
• Work with a globally distributed team focused on the logs and metrics capabilities of Elasticsearch.
• Drive operational and system improvements, introducing clean coding standards and untangling complexity to bring architectural clarity across the platform.
• Serve as a subject matter expert and trusted technical advisor and mentor to the wider engineering organization.
• Triage, resolve, and review issues and pull requests with a global open source community.
• Write idiomatic modern Java, Elasticsearch is 99.8% Java.

Qualifications

• You have implemented novel techniques to efficiently index, store, and query time-series or logs data.
• Experience with data storage technologies such as Elasticsearch, Solr, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, or Prometheus, with an understanding of how and why they work.
• Strong core Java skills, deep understanding of concurrency primitives, and a proven ability to design and optimize efficient data structures and algorithms.
• Track record of using AI to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimize code, with a prompt-engineering mindset and sound judgment about its limits.
• You collaborate effectively across distributed teams with respect, empathy, and professionalism, and communicate well in writing.
• Bonus points for prior Elasticsearch work, open source experience, data storage technology background, and database, search engine, OS, or cloud service development.