Principal Software Engineer - Search Infra - Elasticsearch

What is The Role

We're looking for a Principal Software Engineer to join the Elasticsearch - Search Infra team. 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. This is a principal software engineering role that entails using your vast knowledge in this space in order to define, direct, and build the next generation of Elasticsearch capabilities. This role provides technical vision and direction for Elasticsearch’s core search infrastructure, including indexing, retrieval, and relevance, and requires deep expertise in search internals and cross-team collaboration.

What You Will Be Doing

• Define, lead, and contribute to the evolution of core search and indexing capabilities.
• Research advances in search infrastructure, data structures, and retrieval algorithms to ensure we’re building the most efficient and powerful foundations for our users.
• Work closely with partners and product teams to understand their needs and help shape the long-term technical vision for search at Elastic.
• Bring past experience with large-scale search systems to drive an innovative roadmap for Elasticsearch’s indexing, query execution, and relevance layers.
• Serve as the go-to expert for core search domains, continuously improving them through insights and instincts.

What You Will Bring

• Experience leading technical projects in the search infrastructure and distributed systems space.
• Proven knowledge in building and operating sophisticated search platforms and engineering robust, high-performance software systems.
• Experience mentoring expert engineers, providing both technical and professional guidance.
• Experience defining a long-term technical vision for a core search or retrieval system, working across teams and organizations.
• Hands-on experience with search and indexing technologies such as Elasticsearch, Lucene, or Solr.
• Strong skills in core Java and familiarity with advanced data structures and concurrency constructs, as well as newer language features like lambdas.
• Ability to work with a high level of autonomy, tackling projects and guiding them from concept to completion.
• Experience with large-scale data or search systems (Elasticsearch, Lucene, Solr, or distributed storage engines) and an understanding of their internal mechanics.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.

Bonus Points

• Experience building things with Elasticsearch previously, with an understanding of search and information retrieval theory.
• Experience working with open source projects and familiarity with source control workflows and continuous integration.