Principal Software Developer (Search Infrastructure, Elasticsearch)

Join Elastic, a company dedicated to building the world's best search experience. As a Principal Software Developer, you will lead the evolution of Elasticsearch's core search infrastructure, collaborating with teams across the globe. You will have the opportunity to shape the technical vision for search at Elastic and drive innovation in indexing, query execution, and relevance layers. Enjoy a flexible work environment, generous benefits, and the chance to make a meaningful impact in the world of search technology.

• Define, direct, and build the next generation of Elasticsearch capabilities, focusing on core search infrastructure, indexing, retrieval, and relevance.
• Research advances in search infrastructure, data structures, and retrieval algorithms to ensure the development of efficient and powerful foundations for users.
• Collaborate with partners and product teams to understand their needs and help shape the long-term technical vision for search at Elastic.

• Experience mentoring expert engineers, providing both technical and professional guidance
• Experience leading technical projects in the search infrastructure and distributed systems space. You bring proven knowledge in building and operating sophisticated search platforms and engineering robust, high-performance software systems
• Hands-on experience with search and indexing technologies such as Elasticsearch, Lucene, or Solr
• Experience with large-scale data or search systems such as Elasticsearch, Lucene, Solr, or distributed storage engines, and an understanding of how they work and why they work that way
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills. Collaborating across distributed teams is challenging, we value being supportive, empathetic, and trusting in all interactions, and we expect the same from everyone on the team
• Experience defining a long-term technical vision for a core search or retrieval system, working across teams and organizations to collaboratively shape the technical roadmap
• Strong skills in core Java and familiarity with advanced data structures and concurrency constructs, as well as newer language features like lambdas. You have a strong desire to optimize and leverage the most efficient algorithms and search data structures
• Able to work with a high level of autonomy, tackling projects and guiding them from concept to completion, including both technical design and collaboration with other engineers to develop the necessary components
• 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