Principal Software Engineer - Storage Engine - Elasticsearch

What is The Role

We're looking for a Principal Software Engineer to join the Elasticsearch - Storage Engine team. This globally distributed, fully remote team of experienced engineers develops core storage and query technologies for observability workloads, including improving storage efficiency, advancing ES|QL query processing and performance, and optimizing data layouts for object storage.

This role is responsible for driving the technical vision, architecture, and design of Elasticsearch's core storage and query engine. The ideal candidate has a proven track record of designing high-performance, scalable database or search engine technologies, along with the ability to drive technical initiatives across organizations.

What You Will Be Doing

• Lead the architectural evolution of core storage engine components, continuously identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks in indexing layouts, serialization formats, and resource utilization.
• Lead cross organizational initiatives to drive and build industry-leading observability solutions.
• Work with a globally distributed team of experienced engineers focused on the logs and metrics capabilities of Elasticsearch.
• Drive continuous operational and system improvements by introducing best practices for clean coding standards, demystifying complex system behaviors, untangling complexity to bring architectural clarity across the platform.
• Serve as a subject matter expert (SME) across key areas of Elasticsearch, acting as a trusted technical advisor and mentor to the wider engineering organization.
• Work with a global community to triage, resolve, and review issues and pull requests, collaborating with domain experts as needed.
• Write idiomatic modern Java -- Elasticsearch is 99.8% Java!

What You Bring

• Ability to collaborate across functions and teams and seamlessly transition between different projects, codebases, or teams based on business priorities.
• Ability to work autonomously and drive decisions and results in a distributed team leveraging asynchronous, direct, and transparent communication.
• Proven track record of using AI to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimize code, while still owning the final outcomes.
• A prompt-engineering mindset to know how to leverage AI agents effectively, using sound engineering judgment to validate results and recognize limitations.
• Experience implementing novel techniques to efficiently index, store, and query time-series or logs data.
• Experience with one or more data storage technologies like Elasticsearch, Solr, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, or Prometheus and an understanding of how and why they work.
• Strong core Java skills, a deep understanding of its concurrency primitives, with a proven ability to design and optimize efficient data structures and algorithms.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills.

Bonus Points

• You've built things with Elasticsearch before.
• You've worked with open source projects and are familiar with different styles of source control workflow and continuous integration.
• You’ve worked on data storage technology.
• Experience designing, leading, and owning cross-functional initiatives.
• Past working experience with database, search engine, OS, or cloud service development.