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.
We are on the lookout for a Principal Java Engineer to join our Elasticsearch Core Infra team. The mission of the Elasticsearch Core/Infra team is to create the foundational infrastructure that enables engineers to develop, extend and support Elasticsearch. The team owns common functionality such as services, settings and scripting, and makes Elasticsearch extensible through plugins or the Painless scripting language. The team also makes Elasticsearch observable by providing logging and telemetry information.
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 :- Contributing to large, impactful projects that evolve the core infrastructure that underpins Elasticsearch.
- Shaping how Elasticsearch runs in Elastic Cloud.
- Designing and implementing new horizontally-scalable features and APIs in Elasticsearch
- Understanding and contributing to surrounding layers such as replication and search.
- Optimizing internal data structures used within Elasticsearch.
- Solving difficult issues, including performance or concurrency issues, and proposing solutions.
- Collaborating in the open with the ES team, Elastic users, and other supporting open source projects.
- Supporting our support engineers with the harder problems.
- Helping to drive our long term technical strategy in relation to changes in the JDK and other core dependencies.
- Experience crafting APIs and the ability to reason through tradeoffs.
- Proficient in algorithms and data structures.
- Knowledge of low-level Java such as concurrency, parallelism, classloaders, etc.
- Experience leading large scale projects across engineering teams.
- Ability to own projects from beginning to end. This covers both technical design and working with others to develop needed components.
- Willingness to dive into new issues and ask for help when you need it.
- Knowledge of JDK internals: modules, the Java memory model, garbage collection, database load, caching techniques, etc.
- Knowledge of low level primitives such as JNI (Java Native Interface), JNA (Java Native Access), ByteBuddy, ASM, bytecode, FFI (Foreign Function Interface), and FFM (Foreign Function and Memory API).
- Knowledge of containers and Kubernetes.
As a distributed company, diversity drives our identity. Whether you’re looking to launch a new career or grow an existing one, Elastic is the type of company where you can balance great work with great life. Your age is only a number. It doesn’t matter if you’re just out of college or your children are; we need you for what you can do.
We strive to have parity of benefits across regions and while regulations differ from place to place, we believe taking care of our people is the right thing to do.
- Competitive pay based on the work you do here and not your previous salary
- Health coverage for you and your family in many locations
- Ability to craft your calendar with flexible locations and schedules for many roles
- Generous number of vacation days each year
- Increase your impact - We match up to $2000 (or local currency equivalent) for financial donations and service
- Up to 40 hours each year to use toward volunteer projects you love
- Embracing parenthood with minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave
Different people approach problems differently. We need that. Elastic is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to creating an inclusive culture that celebrates different perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, ethnicity, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, disability status, or any other basis protected by federal, state or local law, ordinance or regulation.
We welcome individuals with disabilities and strive to create an accessible and inclusive experience for all individuals. To request an accommodation during the application or the recruiting process, please email [email protected]. We will reply to your request within 24 business hours of submission.
Applicants have rights under Federal Employment Laws, view posters linked below: Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) Poster; Pay Transparency Nondiscrimination Provision Poster; Employee Polygraph Protection Act (EPPA) Poster and Know Your Rights (Poster)
Elasticsearch develops and distributes technology and information that is subject to U.S. and other countries’ export controls and licensing requirements for individuals who are located in or are nationals of the following sanctioned countries and regions: Belarus, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, or Russia, including the Ukrainian territories annexed by Russia (The Crimea region of Ukraine, The Donetsk People's Republic (DNR), The Luhansk People's Republic (LNR), Kherson or Zaporizhzhia). If you are located in or are a national of one of the listed countries or regions, an export license may be required as a condition of your employment in this role. Please note that national origin and/or nationality do not affect eligibility for employment with Elastic.
Please see here for our Privacy Statement.
Elastic Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Elastic and has not been reviewed or approved by Elastic.
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Fair & Transparent Compensation — Pay is considered competitive across many technical and go‑to‑market roles and compares well within its peer group. Strong equity components and benefits bolster perceived total compensation.
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Healthcare Strength — Health coverage is described as fully paid for employees and families in many locations, which is unusually generous among tech firms. Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage is emphasized in official materials.
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Parental & Family Support — A minimum of 16 weeks of paid parental leave is offered globally, with additional family‑formation support. These policies are positioned as core elements of the package.
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What We Do
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.
Why Work With Us
Free and open isn’t just how we build our products, it’s how we build our culture. We value creativity and mobility, so you can grow how (and where) you want to… and be happier at work.
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