Principal Software Engineer (Performance Tuning, Elasticsearch)

Join the Elasticsearch Performance team as a Principal Software Engineer. In this role, you will lead performance engineering initiatives, develop foundational performance models, drive optimization strategies, and mentor other engineers. You will have the opportunity to work on complex, distributed systems and make a significant impact on the performance and scalability of Elasticsearch.

• Lead architectural and code-level performance engineering initiatives for Elasticsearch, focusing on high-impact optimizations.
• Develop foundational performance models and methodologies for complex, distributed systems, driving optimization strategies.
• Collaborate across the company to embed performance-first thinking into new features, and mentor other engineers in performance-aware development.
• You have a solid comprehension of distributed systems architecture, including partition tolerance, cluster state propagation, and scaling challenges in large-scale data stores
• You have a proven track record of using AI or advanced tooling to accelerate optimization, debug complex performance issues, and automate benchmarking workflows
• You can work autonomously, drive decisions and result in a distributed team by leveraging asynchronous, direct, and transparent communication
• You possess the ability to collaborate across functions and teams, acting as a force multiplier for performance engineering across the organization
• You have proven experience in profiling and optimizing distributed systems. This includes deep experience with benchmarking tools (e.g., flamegraphs, JMH, Rally), identifying performance regressions, and implementing algorithmic or hardware-aware optimizations
• You have deep knowledge of Java internals and JVM memory management. You understand how concurrency models work. You can write code that is high-performance, thread-safe, and lock-free. This experience includes working with large open-source and enterprise codebases
• You possess the ability to collaborate across functions and teams and seamlessly transition between different projects, codebases, or teams based on business priorities
• Experience integrating high-performance native libraries (e.g., C++, Rust, SIMD-accelerated code) into Java applications
• Deep knowledge of modern storage engine performance, index modes, or vector search optimizations
• Experience defining and managing Performance SLAs and success criteria for distributed systems
• Experience working on the internals of a large-scale data store or search engine
• Experience working on the internals of a data store or search engine