Principal Software Engineer I - Distributed Systems - 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 Principal Software Engineer I to join our Elasticsearch - Distributed Systems team and focus on how Elasticsearch provides scale, performance, and resilience. This team owns how nodes in an Elasticsearch cluster communicate, and how data are indexed, allocated, and replicated across nodes.

What You Will Be Doing:

• Improving Elasticsearch’s components that support concurrent and consistent indexing across multiple machines.
• Maintaining our cluster coordination system to keep performance high even though nodes come and go from the cluster and data moves around, while maintaining the safety and liveness properties of the system as a whole.
• Pushing the limits on the number of shards, nodes, and petabytes that Elasticsearch can handle today.
• Looking into all kinds of issues, including performance or concurrency issues, and proposing solutions.
• Supporting our support engineers with the harder problems.

What You Bring:

• A strong background in distributed systems and consensus algorithms.
• You have strong skills in core Java and are conversant in the standard library of data structures and concurrency constructs, as well as newer language features.
• You have a deep technical proficiency in algorithms.
• You have shown your ability to understand and work on complex, highly distributed systems.
• You demonstrate the ability to build and debug features with a broad impact, running on multiple machines.
• You are able to own projects from beginning to end. This covers both technical design and working with others to develop needed components.
• You have experience managing projects involving multiple engineers.

Bonus Points:

• Data stores
• Search, analytics, Lucene
• Strong knowledge of the JDK
• Asynchronous event-driven network frameworks such as Netty

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 powertofly.com . 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:

Elasticsearch develops and distributes technology and information that is subject to U.S. and other countries’ export controls and licensing requirements for individuals who are located in or are nationals of the following sanctioned countries and regions: Belarus, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, or Russia, including the Ukrainian territories annexed by Russia (The Crimea region of Ukraine, The Donetsk People's Republic (DNR), The Luhansk People's Republic (LNR), Kherson or Zaporizhzhia). If you are located in or are a national of one of the listed countries or regions, an export license may be required as a condition of your employment in this role. Please note that national origin and/or nationality do not affect eligibility for employment with Elastic.

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.

The typical starting salary range for this role is:

$133,100—$210,600 USD

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

$159,900—$252,900 USD