Principal Software Engineer I / II - Storage Engine - Elasticsearch

Elastic, the Search AI Company, enables everyone to find the answers they need in real time, using all their data, at scale — unleashing the potential of businesses and people. The Elastic Search AI Platform, used by more than 50% of the Fortune 500, brings together the precision of search and the intelligence of AI to enable everyone to accelerate the results that matter. By taking advantage of all structured and unstructured data — securing and protecting private information more effectively — Elastic’s complete, cloud-based solutions for search, security, and observability help organizations deliver on the promise of AI.

What Is The Role 

We're looking for a Principal Software Engineer I or II to join the Elasticsearch - Storage Engine team. This globally-distributed, completely remote team of senior engineers is responsible for delivering the latest innovations in logs and metrics management. This role includes providing technical vision and direction for building solutions that provide optimized storage and efficient data querying and indexing. 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 developers 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 

• Lead cross organizational initiatives to produce an industry-leading Timeseries solution offering.


• Contribute to Elasticsearch full time, building data intensive new features and fixing intriguing bugs, all while making the code easier to understand. Sometimes you’ll need to implement a data structure or algorithm in the code base. And there will be times when you'll need to get close to the operating system and hardware.


• Work with a globally distributed team of experienced engineers focused on the logs and metrics capabilities of Elasticsearch.


• Be an expert in several areas of Elasticsearch and everyone will turn to you when they have a question about them. You'll improve those areas based on your questions and your instincts.


• Work with community members from all over the world on issues and pull requests, sometimes triaging them and handing them off to other experts and sometimes handling them yourself.


• Write idiomatic modern Java -- Elasticsearch is 99.8% Java!

What You Bring 

• You have implemented novel techniques to efficiently index, store and query Timeseries data.


• You have strong technical leadership skills, work with a high level of autonomy, and are able to take on projects and guide them from beginning to end. This covers both technical design and working with other engineers to develop needed components.


• You have 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.


• You're comfortable developing collaboratively. Giving and receiving feedback on code and approaches and APIs is hard! Bonus points if you've collaborated over the internet because that's harder. Double bonus points for asynchronous collaboration over the internet. That's even harder but we do it anyway because it's the best way we know how to build software. 


• You've used several data storage technologies like Elasticsearch, Solr, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, or Cassandra and have some idea how they work and why they work that way. 


• You have excellent verbal and written communication skills. Like we said, collaborating on the internet is hard. We try to be respectful, empathetic, and trusting in all of our interactions. And we'd expect that from you too.

Bonus Points 

• You've built things with Elasticsearch before.


• You've worked with open source projects and are familiar with different styles of source control workflow and continuous integration.