Principal Java Engineer - Distributed Systems, Serverless - Elasticsearch

In this role, you will help design, build, and operate core components of Elastic’s Serverless Elasticsearch offering. You’ll tackle deep distributed systems challenges to improve scale, performance, and resilience across nodes. You will own end-to-end investigations and collaborate with cross-functional teams to deliver high-impact, multi-machine features. This is a chance to shape a widely used, AI-accelerated search platform and drive how data is indexed and managed at scale.

• competitive pay
• health coverage for you and family
• flexible locations and schedules
• generous vacation days
• donation matching up to 2000
• volunteer hours

• Design, build, and operate components for the next-generation Serverless Elasticsearch
• Improve concurrent indexing across multiple machines
• Maintain cluster coordination to preserve performance, safety, and liveness as nodes join/leave and data moves
• Push scalability limits for shards, nodes, and petabytes
• Investigate performance and concurrency issues and propose solutions
• Support engineers with complex problems
• Own operational investigations end-to-end until issues are resolved

• Deep background in distributed systems and consensus algorithms
• Strong Java skills and familiarity with core data structures and concurrency
• Proficiency in algorithms
• Experience building large-scale distributed systems (not using off-the-shelf services)
• Experience designing and debugging features with broad cross-machine impact
• Ability to own projects end-to-end (technical design and delivery)
• Experience managing projects with multiple engineers
• Proven track record of using AI to accelerate development and optimize code while owning outcomes
• Ability to collaborate across functions and transition between projects/teams
• Ability to work autonomously and drive decisions in a distributed team using asynchronous communication

• collaboration across teams
• autonomy in decision-making
• clear communication
• Distributed systems
• Consensus algorithms
• Java programming