Elasticsearch - Principal Developer Engineer I - Query Engine, Database Internals

What is The Role

We're looking for a Principal Developer Engineer to join the Elasticsearch - Analytical Engine team. This expert team of engineers is responsible for building new analytics capabilities in Elasticsearch’s completely new compute engine, and accessed via our new piped query language called ES|QL. This is a principle software engineering role that entails using your vast knowledge in this space in order to define, direct, and build the next generation of ES|QL capabilities. This role includes providing technical vision and direction for the customer/user interfaces and for the underlying language syntax and compute infrastructure. This role requires related past technical experience in addition to the ability to work cross-organization.

Our company is distributed by intention. 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. At our best, we write fast, scalable, and intuitive software. We 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.

What You Will Be Doing

As a full-time Elasticsearch contributor, you will define, lead, and contribute to the development of data-intensive enhancements. You’ll research the latest features, data structures, and algorithms in the industry to ensure we’re building the right capabilities for our users. You’ll work directly with our partners and product teams to understand their needs and build out a strategic vision for the longer term. You’ll bring your past experience in analytics systems to help build and drive an innovative roadmap for ES|QL and the compute engine. As an authority in several areas of Elasticsearch, everyone will turn to you when they have a question about that area. You'll improve those areas based on your questions and your instincts.

Our globally distributed team of expert engineers is focused on the search and query (ES|QL) analytics capabilities of Elasticsearch. This inclusive team collaborates closely with other user experience teams, crafting a friendly user interface, and with teams closer to the customer, building solutions on top of these APIs (Search, Security, Observability)

Finally, we write idiomatic modern Java -- Elasticsearch is 99.8% Java!

What You Bring

• Experience leading technical projects in the data and enterprise architecture areas. You bring proven knowledge in building and running sophisticated technical infrastructures and engineering sound software systems.


• Experience mentoring expert engineers, providing technical and professional guidance.


• Experience defining a long-term technical vision for an area of a data-intensive application, working across teams and organizations to collaboratively build the technical roadmap.


• Hands-on experience with search and analytics APIs, some examples may include Splunk SPL, Elasticsearch, Datadog, Dynatrace, and New Relic.


• Strong skills in core Java and are conversant in the standard library of data structures and concurrency constructs, as well as newer features like lambdas. You have a strong desire to optimize and make use of the most efficient data structures and algorithms.


• Working with a high level of autonomy, able to tackle projects and guide them from beginning to end. This covers both technical design and working with other engineers to develop needed components.


• Experience with data storage technologies like Elasticsearch, Solr, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, or Cassandra, and an understanding of how they work and why they work that way.


• Excellent verbal and written communication skills. Collaborating on the internet is hard. We try to be supportive, empathetic, and trusting in all of our interactions. And we expect that from everyone too.

Bonus Points

• You've built things with Elasticsearch before, and you have experience in the search and information retrieval space and understand the constructs and theory behind it.


• Experience working with open source projects and familiar with different styles of source control workflow and continuous integration.