Principal Software Engineer, Elastic

Distributed Systems

$199.7-379.3k

Actual salary range is dependent on location. This role is currently eligible to participate in Elastic's stock program

Java

Lucene

Senior and Expert level

Remote from Europe, US

More information about location

Open source platform powering search, observability, security, and more

Open for applications

Open source platform powering search, observability, security, and more

1001+ employees

B2BAnalyticsSaaS

Open for applications

$199.7-379.3k

Actual salary range is dependent on location. This role is currently eligible to participate in Elastic's stock program

Java

Lucene

Senior and Expert level

Remote from Europe, US

More information about location

1001+ employees

B2BAnalyticsSaaS

Company mission

To help turn endless data possibilities into real results with the power of Search AI.

Job

Company

Role

Who you are

A strong background in distributed systems and consensus algorithms
You have strong skills in core Java and are conversant in the standard library of data structures and concurrency constructs, as well as newer language features
You have a deep technical proficiency in algorithms
You have shown your ability to understand and work on complex, highly distributed systems
You demonstrate the ability to build and debug features with a broad impact, running on multiple machines
You are able to own projects from beginning to end. This covers both technical design and working with others to develop needed components
You have experience managing projects involving multiple engineers

Desirable

Data stores
Search, analytics, Lucene
Strong knowledge of the JDK
Asynchronous event-driven network frameworks such as Netty

What the job involves

We are on the lookout for a Principal Software Engineer I to join our Elasticsearch - Distributed Systems team and focus on how Elasticsearch provides scale, performance, and resilience. This team owns how nodes in an Elasticsearch cluster communicate, and how data are indexed, allocated, and replicated across nodes
Improving Elasticsearch’s components that support concurrent and consistent indexing across multiple machines
Maintaining our cluster coordination system to keep performance high even though nodes come and go from the cluster and data moves around, while maintaining the safety and liveness properties of the system as a whole
Pushing the limits on the number of shards, nodes, and petabytes that Elasticsearch can handle today
Looking into all kinds of issues, including performance or concurrency issues, and proposing solutions
Supporting our support engineers with the harder problems

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

Top investors

8% employee growth in 12 months

Glassdoor (3.8)

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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