Senior AI Research Engineer, Elastic
Open source platform powering search, observability, security, and more
Open for applications
Open source platform powering search, observability, security, and more
1001+ employees
Open for applications
1001+ employees
Company mission
To help turn endless data possibilities into real results with the power of Search AI.
Role
Who you are
- PhD or MSc in Computer Science, Machine Learning, NLP, or related field
- 3+ years of experience training production models (full training pipelines, not only fine-tuning)
- 3+ years of professional Python development (PyTorch, Transformers, distributed training)
- Strong foundation in information retrieval and neural search
- Track record of publications at major venues (ACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, or equivalent)
Desirable
- Experience training embedding models or rerankers
- Understanding of token economics: batch sizes, throughput, latency, and context length tradeoffs
- Ability to rapidly prototype—read a paper and have a working experiment within days
- Contributions to open-source ML projects
- Familiarity with retrieval benchmarks and their limitations
What the job involves
- We're now building out the Search Foundation Models at Elastic and looking for exceptional researchers to join us
- Architectures: Encoder/decoder designs, single vs. multi-vector representations, early vs. late interaction mechanisms
- Scale & Efficiency: Long-context retrieval (8K+), sparse embeddings, low-bit/binary quantization, Matryoshka representation learning
- Modalities: Multilingual models, multimodal/omni retrieval, vision-based document understanding
- Training: Synthetic data generation for hard negative mining, retrieval model distillation, learning directly from embedding space
- Emerging Directions: R1-style reasoning retrieval models, task-specific vs. multi-task training strategies
Our take
Organizations are dealing with exploding data volumes increasingly sophisticated cyber threats, and the growing expectation tha ttechnology should help act on problems, not just report them. Ai is moving from experimentation into real operations, especially in security and observability where speed and context are critical. So now, both enterprises and governments are looking for simpler, shared platforms that sale easily and reduce complexity rather than add to it.
And Elastic sits at the intersection of these needs with its Search AI Platform that helps organizations turn large amounts of structured and unstructured data into clear insights and actiontions across search, security, and observability. Elastic's strength lies in its open, flexible approach, which breaks down data silos and provides a context people and AI systems need to make daster, better decisions. The goal is straightforward: help teams see what's happening, understand it quickly, and respond confidently.
Recently, the company worked with CISA to deliver a unified, cloud-based SIEM for US federal agencies, this highlights strong trust in Elastic's security and scalability. Alongside this, its AWS Agentic AI Specialization also reflects leadership in making autonomous AI system practical and reliable. Together, these milestones position Elastic well for the future, as organizations increasingly rely on shared platforms and intelligent systems to manage ris, complexity, and growth.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
8% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 4 rounds)
Jul 2016
$58m
SERIES D
Jun 2014
$70m
SERIES C
Total funding: $162m
Company benefits
- Toast to your health: Fully paid health coverage for you and your family, in many locations.
- Craft your calendar: Flexible location and schedule for most roles.
- Create space for you: Distributed by design workforce, plus generous number of vacation days each year.
- Embrace parenthood: Minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave, plus generous family formation benefits.
- Give back your time: 40 hours each year to use toward volunteering with organizations and causes you’re passionate about.
- Amplify your impact: Double your charitable giving — we match donations up to $1500 USD (or local currency equivalent).
Company HQ
Union Square, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Ashutosh Kulkarni
(CEO)Ashutosh joined Elastic in 2021 as CPO, becoming CEO in 2022. Prior to this, he was an EVP and CPO of Enterprise at McAfee, a Senior VP and GM of Web Performance and Web Security at Akamai Technologies, and a Senior VP and GM of Informatica Cloud at Informatica.
Shay Banon
(Co-Founder & CTO)Shay co-founded Elastic in 2012 and has served as the CTO since.
Navam Welihinda
(CFO)Prior to joining Elastic in 2025, Navam was the CFO at Grammarly. He also spent nearly 8 years at HashiCorp as VP of Finance and CFO and was the Head of Finance, Compose at IBM for 1 year.
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