Principal Developer Engineer, Elastic
Query Engine, Database Internals, Elasticsearch
CA$192.5-304.5k
This role is currently eligible to participate in Elastic's stock program
Open source platform powering search, observability, security, and more
Be an early applicant
Open source platform powering search, observability, security, and more
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
CA$192.5-304.5k
This role is currently eligible to participate in Elastic's stock program
1001+ employees
Company mission
To help turn endless data possibilities into real results with the power of Search AI.
Role
Who you are
- Experience leading technical projects in the data and enterprise architecture areas. You bring proven knowledge in building and running sophisticated technical infrastructures and engineering sound software systems
- Experience mentoring expert engineers, providing technical and professional guidance
- Experience defining a long-term technical vision for an area of a data-intensive application, working across teams and organizations to collaboratively build the technical roadmap
- Hands-on experience with search and analytics APIs, some examples may include Splunk SPL, Elasticsearch, Datadog, Dynatrace, and New Relic
- Strong skills in core Java and are conversant in the standard library of data structures and concurrency constructs, as well as newer features like lambdas. You have a strong desire to optimize and make use of the most efficient data structures and algorithms
- Working with a high level of autonomy, able to tackle projects and guide them from beginning to end. This covers both technical design and working with other engineers to develop needed components
- Experience with data storage technologies like Elasticsearch, Solr, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, or Cassandra, and an understanding of how they work and why they work that way
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills. Collaborating on the internet is hard. We try to be supportive, empathetic, and trusting in all of our interactions. And we expect that from everyone too
Desirable
- You've built things with Elasticsearch before, and you have experience in the search and information retrieval space and understand the constructs and theory behind it
- Experience working with open source projects and familiar with different styles of source control workflow and continuous integration
What the job involves
- We're looking for a Principal Developer Engineer to join the Elasticsearch - Analytical Engine team
- This expert team of engineers is responsible for building new analytics capabilities in Elasticsearch’s completely new compute engine, and accessed via our new piped query language called ES|QL
- This is a principal software engineering role that entails using your vast knowledge in this space in order to define, direct, and build the next generation of ES|QL capabilities
- This role includes providing technical vision and direction for the customer/user interfaces and for the underlying language syntax and compute infrastructure
- This role requires related past technical experience in addition to the ability to work cross-organization
- 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
- At our best, we write fast, scalable, and intuitive software
- We believe that the best way to do that is to empower individual engineers, code review every change, decide big things by consensus, and strive for incremental improvements
- As a full-time Elasticsearch contributor, you will define, lead, and contribute to the development of data-intensive enhancements
- You’ll research the latest features, data structures, and algorithms in the industry to ensure we’re building the right capabilities for our users
- You’ll work directly with our partners and product teams to understand their needs and build out a strategic vision for the longer term
- You’ll bring your past experience in analytics systems to help build and drive an innovative roadmap for ES|QL and the compute engine
- As an authority in several areas of Elasticsearch, everyone will turn to you when they have a question about that area
- You'll improve those areas based on your questions and your instincts
- Our globally distributed team of expert engineers is focused on the search and query (ES|QL) analytics capabilities of Elasticsearch
- This inclusive team collaborates closely with other user experience teams, crafting a friendly user interface, and with teams closer to the customer, building solutions on top of these APIs (Search, Security, Observability)
- Finally, we write idiomatic modern Java -- Elasticsearch is 99.8% Java!
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.
Share this job
View 75 more jobs at Elastic