Senior Software Engineer - Search Algorithms - Elasticsearch

What is The Role

We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join the Elasticsearch - Search Relevance team. This globally-distributed team of expert engineers focuses on delivering a robust and feature-rich search experience, including contributing to improving the search experience in Lucene. This technical leader is responsible for contributing to the technical direction and vision for our search capabilities, including design and implementation of new search features, enhancements to search functionality, and resolving bugs.

Our company is distributed by intention. We hire the best engineers we can find wherever they are, whoever they are. We collaborate across continents every day over email, GitHub, Zoom, and Slack.

What You Will Be Doing

• Lead initiatives within Elasticsearch to produce an industry-leading search engine offering, supplying unparalleled speed and relevance in search.
• Contribute to Elasticsearch full time, building new search features and fixing intriguing bugs, all while making the code easier to understand. Sometimes you'll need to invent a new algorithm or data structure, find one and implement it, or get close to the operating system and hardware.
• Work with a globally distributed team of experienced engineers focused on the vector search capabilities of Elasticsearch.
• Be an expert on Elasticsearch search relevance. You'll identify and drive improvements in this area based on your questions and your instincts.
• Work with community members from all over the world on issues and pull requests, sometimes triaging them and handing them off to other experts and sometimes handling them yourself.
• Write idiomatic modern Java -- Elasticsearch is 99.8% Java!

What You Bring

• Professional experience with search or vector databases, and experience using HNSW, IVF, or other relevant algorithms and libraries on search platforms at scale.
• Solid skills in core Java, conversant in the standard library of data structures and concurrency constructs, as well as features like lambdas.
• High level of autonomy with the ability to take on projects and guide them from beginning to end, including technical design and cross-engineer collaboration.
• Comfort with developing collaboratively, including giving and receiving feedback asynchronously across distributed environments.
• Experience with several data storage technologies (such as Elasticsearch, Solr, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, or Cassandra).
• Proven track record of using AI to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimize code, while owning final outcomes.
• Ability to collaborate across functions and transition between projects, codebases, or teams based on business priorities.

Bonus Points

• Prior experience building things with Elasticsearch.
• Experience working with open source projects and familiarity with source control workflows and continuous integration.
• Experience designing, leading, and owning cross-functional initiatives.