Principal Engineer, Elastic
Elasticsearch, Core Infrastructure & JVM Internals
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
- Experience crafting APIs and the ability to reason through tradeoffs
- Proficient in algorithms and data structures
- Knowledge of low-level Java such as concurrency, parallelism, classloaders, etc
- Experience leading large scale projects across engineering teams
- Willingness to dive into new issues and ask for help when you need it
Desirable
- Knowledge of JDK internals: modules, the Java memory model, garbage collection, database load, caching techniques, etc
- Knowledge of low level primitives such as JNI (Java Native Interface), JNA (Java Native Access), ByteBuddy, ASM, bytecode, FFI (Foreign Function Interface), and FFM (Foreign Function and Memory API)
- Knowledge of containers and Kubernetes
What the job involves
- We are on the lookout for a Principal Java Engineer to join our Elasticsearch Core Infra team
- The mission of the Elasticsearch Core/Infra team is to create the foundational infrastructure that enables engineers to develop, extend and support Elasticsearch
- The team owns common functionality such as services, settings and scripting, and makes Elasticsearch extensible through plugins or the Painless scripting language
- The team also makes Elasticsearch observable by providing logging and telemetry information
- You will be a strong individual contributor on the team but you will also contribute to and lead cross team projects
- We need someone who has great design skills, who can work at a low level of abstraction but can equally communicate technical concepts across a variety of collaborators
- Contributing to large, impactful projects that evolve the core infrastructure that underpins Elasticsearch
- Shaping how Elasticsearch runs in Elastic Cloud
- Designing and implementing new horizontally-scalable features and APIs in Elasticsearch
- Understanding and contributing to surrounding layers such as replication and search
- Optimizing internal data structures used within Elasticsearch
- Solving difficult issues, including performance or concurrency issues, and proposing solutions
- Collaborating in the open with the ES team, Elastic users, and other supporting open source projects
- Supporting our support engineers with the harder problems
- Helping to drive our long term technical strategy in relation to changes in the JDK and other core dependencies
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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