Elasticsearch - Senior Java Engineer - Performance Tuning (JDK, Lucene)

What is The Role

We are on the lookout for a Senior/Principal Java Engineer to join our Elasticsearch team. This role specializes in deep, low-level performance engineering at the Elasticsearch code level and lower (Lucene, JDK). The focus of the role will rotate across different areas, such as logging, metrics, vector search, and ES|QL, partnering with existing area-specific teams to maximize the performance of their features.

Our company is distributed by intention. We hire the best engineers we can find wherever they are, whoever they are. As a result, our team is diverse and distributed across continents. We collaborate every day over email, GitHub, Zoom, and Slack. Effective written communication skills are important.

At our best, we write fast, scalable, and intuitive software. We believe that the best way to do that is to code review for every change, decide big things by consensus, and strive for incremental improvements. We believe the team should be aware of how our customers (both technical and non-technical) use our products and be empowered to make bold and impactful decisions.

You will be a strong individual contributor on the team but you will also contribute to and lead cross team projects. We need someone who has great design skills, who can work at a low level of abstraction but can equally communicate technical concepts across a variety of collaborators.

What You Will Be Doing

• Shaping how Elasticsearch runs in Elastic Cloud


• Optimizing low-level code to improve speed, efficiency, and scalability across Elasticsearch.


• Solving difficult problems, involving data structures and concurrency, and driving solutions.


• Partnering with area teams to co-design, profile, and tune features.


• Collaborating in the open with the ES team, Elastic users, and other supporting open source projects


• Share best practices and tools to strengthen long-term performance culture.


• Supporting our support engineers with the harder problems

What You Bring 

• Experience profiling and applying optimizations to code


• Proficient in algorithms and data structures


• Experience crafting APIs and the ability to reason through tradeoffs


• Knowledge of low-level Java such as concurrency, parallelism, classloaders, etc.


• Experience leading large scale projects across engineering teams


• Willingness to dive into new issues and ask for help when you need it

Bonus Points

• Experience with JMH (Java Microbenchmark Harness)


• Hands-on use of recent Java Panama APIs, or JNI