Director of Software Engineering - Distributed Systems, Serverless - Elasticsearch

Elastic, the Search AI Company, enables everyone to find the answers they need in real time, using all their data, at scale — unleashing the potential of businesses and people. The Elastic Search AI Platform, used by more than 50% of the Fortune 500, brings together the precision of search and the intelligence of AI to enable everyone to accelerate the results that matter. By taking advantage of all structured and unstructured data — securing and protecting private information more effectively — Elastic’s complete, cloud-based solutions for search, security, and observability help organizations deliver on the promise of AI.

What is The Role:

We are on the lookout for a Director of Software Engineering to lead our Elasticsearch Distributed Systems organisation which focuses on how Elasticsearch provides scale, performance, and resilience, especially in the context of our Serverless offering.

As Director of Software Engineering, you will be leading an organisation of approximately 40 engineers and managers to tackle the deep distributed systems challenges that allow Elasticsearch to excel at scale. Your customers are every Elasticsearch user and each solution team which builds upon Elasticsearch.

Our company is distributed by intention. We hire the best engineers we can find wherever they are, whoever they are. As a result, our team is diverse and distributed across continents. We collaborate every day over email, GitHub, Zoom, and Slack. The ability to lead a distributed team is critical.

What You Will Be Doing:

• Develop and execute a long-term engineering strategy for Elasticsearch's distributed systems, aligning technical priorities with product direction and business objectives.
• Drive improvements in performance, scalability, reliability and cost efficiency, including foundational capabilities supporting Serverless Elasticsearch.
• Lead the evolution of Elasticsearch's core distributed architecture, including cluster coordination, data allocation, indexing, replication and recovery.
• Provide technical leadership and oversight for complex engineering initiatives and programs, helping engineering managers and technical leaders navigate architectural decisions and competing priorities.
• Own engineering outcomes across your organisation, balancing technical complexity, customer impact, reliability, operational requirements and long-term maintainability.
• Lead, mentor, hire and develop engineering managers and senior technical leaders, establishing high performance standards and building a strong pipeline of future leaders, fostering an inclusive culture of collaboration and technical excellence.
• Take ownership of organisational planning, staffing and resource allocation, ensuring teams have the capabilities and support needed to deliver on strategic priorities.
• Partner with Product Management, engineering leaders and other teams across Elastic to define priorities and deliver complex initiatives spanning multiple engineering organisations.
• Act as a senior escalation point for critical technical and operational challenges, working closely with engineering, Support and SRE teams to drive effective resolution.
• Communicate engineering strategy, organisational priorities and progress to senior executives, influencing decisions that have a significant impact on Elastic and its customers.
• Run performance management with consistency (promotions, development plans, and managing underperformance through to resolution) and working with your managers to do the same.

What You Bring:

• A proven track record of leading large-scale engineering organisations, including experience managing engineering managers and developing senior technical leaders.
• Previous hands‑on software engineering experience, with strong computer science fundamentals and substantial technical depth in distributed systems.
• Extensive experience designing, building or operating complex, large-scale distributed systems, ideally involving database engines, distributed storage or large-scale data processing.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems concepts, including concurrency, consistency, replication, fault tolerance, recovery and performance optimisation.
• Experience establishing engineering strategy, making architectural trade-offs and delivering complex initiatives involving multiple teams and significant technical dependencies.
• A track record of building effective engineering organisations, including organisational planning, senior‑level hiring, performance management and leadership development.
• Strong operational experience, with a deep understanding of system reliability, production troubleshooting and the challenges of operating distributed systems at scale.
• Experience partnering with senior engineering and product leaders to establish strategic priorities, allocate resources and deliver meaningful business outcomes.
• The ability to navigate complex organisational challenges, influence senior stakeholders and make informed decisions in situations with significant technical or business consequences.
• A compassionate approach to leadership, with a genuine commitment to coaching, developing and supporting the people you work with.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including experience presenting technical strategy and organisational priorities to senior executives.

Additional Information - We Take Care of Our People:

As a distributed company, diversity drives our identity. Whether you’re looking to launch a new career or grow an existing one, Elastic is the type of company where you can balance great work with great life. Your age is only a number. It doesn’t matter if you’re just out of college or your children are; we need you for what you can do.

We strive to have parity of benefits across regions, and while regulations differ from place to place, we believe taking care of our people is the right thing to do.

• Competitive pay based on the work you do here and not your previous salary
• Health coverage for you and your family in many locations
• Ability to craft your calendar with flexible locations and schedules for many roles
• Generous number of vacation days each year
• Increase your impact - We match up to $2000 (or local currency equivalent) for financial donations and service
• Up to 40 hours each year to use toward volunteer projects you love
• Embracing parenthood with a minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave

Security & Privacy Responsibilities: Take ownership of protecting the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of organizational data and systems by following applicable privacy and security policies, standards, and procedures. Ensure that all individual contributions follow Elastic’s Secure Software Development Framework (SSDF). Proactively participate in mandatory role-based training to ensure personal technical execution consistently aligns with the highest standards of data protection, data privacy, and system resilience.

Different people approach problems differently. We need that. Elastic is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to creating an inclusive culture that celebrates different perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, ethnicity, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, disability status, or any other basis protected by federal, state or local law, ordinance or regulation.

We welcome individuals with disabilities and strive to create an accessible and inclusive experience for all individuals. To request an accommodation during the application or the recruiting process, please email View email address on click.appcast.io. We will reply to your request within 24 business hours of submission.

Applicants have rights under Federal Employment Laws and can view the following posters linked below:

Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) Poster

Employee Polygraph Protection Act (EPPA) Poster

Please see here for our Privacy Statement.

Compensation for this role is in the form of base salary. This role does not have a variable compensation component.

The typical starting salary range for new hires in this role is listed below. In select locations (including Seattle WA, Los Angeles CA, the San Francisco Bay Area CA, and the New York City Metro Area), an alternate range may apply as specified below.

These ranges represent the lowest to highest salary we reasonably and in good faith believe we would pay for this role at the time of this posting. We may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range, and the ranges may be modified in the future.

An employee's position within the salary range will be based on several factors including, but not limited to, relevant education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, geographic location, performance, and business or organizational needs.

Elastic believes that employees should have the opportunity to share in the value that we create together for our shareholders. Therefore, in addition to cash compensation, this role is currently eligible to participate in Elastic's stock program. Our total rewards package also includes a company-matched 401k with dollar-for-dollar matching up to 6% of eligible earnings, along with a range of other benefits offered with a holistic emphasis on employee well-being.

The typical starting salary range for this role is:

$199,700—$315,900 USD

The typical starting salary range for this role in the select locations listed above is:

$239,800—$379,300 USD