Principal Software Engineer, Elastic
Storage Engine, Elasticsearch
$159.8-303.5k
Salary range dependent on candidate location. 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
$159.8-303.5k
Salary range dependent on candidate location. 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
- The ideal candidate has a proven track record of designing high-performance, scalable database or search engine technologies, along with the ability to drive technical initiatives across organizations
- You possess the ability to collaborate across functions and teams and seamlessly transition between different projects, codebases, or teams based on business priorities
- You work autonomously and can drive decisions and results in a distributed team by leveraging asynchronous, direct, and transparent communication
- You have a proven track record of using AI to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimize code, while still owning the final outcomes
- You bring a prompt-engineering mindset to know how to leverage AI agents effectively, using sound engineering judgment to validate results and recognize its limitations
- You have implemented novel techniques to efficiently index, store, and query time-series or logs data
- You have experience with one or more data storage technologies like Elasticsearch, Solr, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, or Prometheus and have some idea how they work and why they work that way
- You have strong core Java skills, a deep understanding of its concurrency primitives, with a proven ability to design and optimize efficient data structures and algorithms
- You excel in a collaborative environment, actively participate in technical discussions, and work effectively across distributed teams. Because it's the best way we know how to build software
- You have excellent verbal and written communication skills and collaborate with respect, empathy, and professionalism in a distributed team
Desirable
- You've built things with Elasticsearch before
- You've worked with open source projects and are familiar with different styles of source control workflow and continuous integration
- You've worked on data storage technology
- You have experience designing, leading, and owning cross-functional initiatives
- You have past working experience with database, search engine, OS, or cloud service development
What the job involves
- We're looking for a Principal Software Engineer to join the Elasticsearch - Storage Engine team
- This globally distributed, fully remote team of experienced engineers develops core storage and query technologies for observability workloads, including improving storage efficiency, advancing ES|QL query processing and performance, and optimizing data layouts for object storage
- This role is responsible for driving the technical vision, architecture, and design of Elasticsearch's core storage and query engine
- Our company is distributed by intention
- We hire the best developers 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
- Lead the architectural evolution of core storage engine components, continuously identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks in indexing layouts, serialization formats, and resource utilization
- Lead cross organizational initiatives to drive and build industry-leading observability solutions
- Work with a globally distributed team of experienced engineers focused on the logs and metrics capabilities of Elasticsearch
- Drive continuous operational and system improvements by introducing best practices for clean coding standards, demystifying complex system behaviors, untangling complexity to bring architectural clarity across the platform
- Serve as a subject matter expert (SME) across key areas of Elasticsearch, acting as a trusted technical advisor and mentor to the wider engineering organization
- Work with a global community to triage, resolve, and review issues and pull requests, collaborating with domain experts as needed
- 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.
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