Principal Software Engineer - Search Scaling - Elasticsearch

## Responsibilities - 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 building the most efficient and powerful foundations for 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. - Be the go-to expert for several areas of Elasticsearch, continuously improving them through insights and instincts. ## Requirements - 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 to collaboratively shape the technical roadmap. - 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, including both technical design and collaboration with other engineers to develop the necessary components. - Experience with large-scale data or search systems such as Elasticsearch, Lucene, Solr, or distributed storage engines, and an understanding of how they work and why they work that way. - Excellent verbal and written communication skills. Collaborating across distributed teams is challenging, we value being supportive, empathetic, and trusting in all interactions, and we expect the same from everyone on the team. ## Nice to Have - Built things with Elasticsearch before, with experience in the search and information retrieval space and understanding of the constructs and theory behind it. - Experience working with open source projects and familiar with different styles of source control workflow and continuous integration. ## Benefits - Distributed company with a focus on diversity and work-life balance. - Opportunity to work with a globally-distributed team of experienced engineers. - Collaborative environment that empowers individual engineers, code reviews every change, and decides big things by consensus. - Focus on writing fast, scalable, and intuitive software.