Senior Engineering Manager - Search Scaling - Elasticsearch

What is The Role

The Elasticsearch team is in charge of building the core platform that powers search for Elastic’s customers and users for e-commerce, observability, SIEM, and more. This globally-distributed team of experienced engineers focuses on delivering a robust and feature-rich search experience, including contributing to improving the search experience in Lucene, evolving the search tier of our Serverless architecture, and building search functionality in our new piped query language, ES|QL.

This is an experienced team lead role where you will be working with the team that delivers these search-focused enhancements to the Elasticsearch platform. The goal of this team is to build a high quality, fast, and relevant foundation for search within Elasticsearch. You will participate in roadmap and project planning efforts and will have ownership for delivering it. You’ll be participating in project management efforts as the teams complete plans together with the Tech Lead and Product Manager.

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.

Engineering philosophy

We believe that engineering complex, pluggable software that is built to last the test of time is both tricky and exciting. Doing so requires a team of diverse individuals, with sharp minds and the ability to empathize with our users, working together with mutual respect and a common mission.

We care deeply about giving you full ownership of what you're working on. Our company fundamentally believes great minds achieve greatness when they are set free and are surrounded and challenged by their peers, which is clearly visible throughout our organization. At Elastic, hierarchy does not determine how decisions get made. We feel that anyone needs to be in the position to comment on anything, regardless of their role within the company.

What You Will Be Doing

• Manage, mentor and lead a globally distributed team of go engineers working on search functionality within Elasticsearch.


• Lead the efficient delivery of search enhancements with regular releases of Elasticsearch, ensuring high quality and innovative feature development.


• Work with our product managers to define requirements.


• Foster a culture of mutual respect, collaboration and consensus based decision-making.


• Stay true to the principles of software development as adopted by our team.


• Build roadmaps and lead prioritization; balance the right amount of structure and planning for a fast-paced engineering team.


• Identify resource requirements and help drive recruitment of high quality colleagues.


• Support the development and training of direct reports through regular 1:1s and career conversations.


• Be a great person to work with, somebody who sincerely empathizes with others.

What You Bring 

• Experience leading distributed teams of software engineers


• Ability to work in a distributed team throughout the world.


• Strong communication skills, both verbal and written, with the ability to drive conversations across multiple teams to a conclusion.


• Previous experience working with collaborators outside of Engineering.


• You know and care about writing performant software and have traced and fixed performance issues yourself.


• Ability to work in a fast paced environment.


• Ability to work independently.

Bonus Points

• Significant experience as a hands-on software engineer so you understand the core principles of the engineering work that is going on in your team.


• Experience working in Lucene or Solr.


• Open Source experience.


• Prior professional exposure to Elasticsearch.


• Hands-on experience with Docker and Kubernetes.