Principal SRE (Networking) - Platform Control Plane

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:

As part of the Platform Engineering department, the Network Infrastructure team is crafting, building, and improving the multi-cloud platform at scale for Elastic Cloud Hosted and Serverless. We grow and mature our distributed large-scale network infrastructure that spans across multiple cloud service providers to support our cloud services . We are built on Kubernetes, Go, and custom orchestration architectures. In your daily life with us, you will participate in coding, innovating technical designs, crafting solutions, improving resilience, and prioritizing security, bug fixes, and features. For example, Debugging Azure Networking for Elastic Cloud Serverless is part of our efforts, and we want your experience to contribute to a truly exceptional customer experience!

What You Will Be Doing:

• Taking an engineering approach in leading technical initiatives for designing, building and automating network infrastructure and services to guarantee the reliability of the global Elastic network infrastructure. Focusing on Layer 2/3/4 of the TCP/IP stack (Ethernet and/or IP encapsulation, routing, firewalling, load balancing).


• Growing our global Platform network infrastructure to meet the increasing scaling demands by Developing and maintaining software, codebases, tooling and automations to serve our Network Infrastructure as Code principle.


• Collaborating in an environment with an inclusive approach, and focusing on operational excellence which uplifts others.


• Preventing repeated customer impact in response to major incidents and prioritised problem management. Our on call rotation is spread well, and we address complex customer concerns too.

What You Bring:

• Excellent networking skills, with knowledge of protocols such as IP/IPv6, TCP/UDP, BGP, DNS.


• Strong technical depth for building and automating networks (Terraform, Ansible) in collaboration with other engineers as an authority in identifying, implementing and delivering solutions.


• Good knowledge of public CSP network components (Load balancers, VPC peering/Transit gateways, VPN connectivity, Direct Connects)


• Success and lessons of experiences from striving for 'progress not perfection' in the name of Platform reliability. We want to hear about your customer first approach in solving operational problems for both today and the future.


• Passion for developing solutions that involve inclusive communication methods to grow and strengthen partner and team relationships. Examples of working in distributed teams or working remotely is desirable.


• Site-Reliability Engineering experience. We tackle problems with code, but fundamentally we keep things working and have proven success in operational excellence. Responding to and preventing repeated customer impact in response to major incidents and prioritized problem management. Our on call rotation uses follow-the-sun model where everyone participates in it in (mostly) their working hours.

Bonus Points:

• You have operated a SaaS product in a public cloud ideally built using Infrastructure-as-Code tooling such as Crossplane or Terraform.


• You have designed and/or operated large network topologies that dynamic routing is based on BGP.


• You have operated network topologies based on software routers.


• You have experience in IP address management (IPAM) and you have used relevant tools for automated IP allocations.


• You have designed and /or operated overlay networks with use of encapsulation protocols such as IPSec, GRE and VXLANYou have built or operated a Kubernetes-at-scale infrastructure, ideally across multiple cloud providers, with knowledge of the Cilium CNI.


• You have written non-trivial programs in Golang or other programming languages.


• You have worked with containerized services (such as Docker.)


• You have proven experience in leading and improving alerting and major incident management standard processes metrics systems (e.g. Elastic Stack, Graphite, Prometheus, Influx) to diagnose issues and quantify impacts to present to others at varying level of the organization.


• You have experience in system and network administration with professional skills in Linux on distributed systems at scale.


• You have diagnosed or designed, implemented and created solutions with the Elastic Stack.


• You are experienced in thriving in a self-organizing and sharing in a globally distributed team environment.


• You strengthen team members in bringing out the best of each other by uplifting others with coaching and mentoring.