Principal Software Engineer

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

The enterprise software landscape is undergoing a structural shift. AI-assisted development has dropped the cost and time required to build custom internal tools by more than half. Retool's 2026 State of Internal Software report found that 35% of enterprises have already replaced SaaS tools with purpose-built software, and 78% plan to build more in the year ahead. The calculus has changed: what previously required a six-figure vendor contract and a year-long implementation is now a small engineering team and a few focused sprints.

Elastic is at the beginning of this journey. We operate the Elastic Stack — Elasticsearch, Kibana, Elastic ML, and a growing set of AI-native capabilities — at production scale for thousands of customers. And we are increasingly building on our own platform internally: replacing expensive SaaS tools with Elastic-native systems that are faster, more intelligent, and owned entirely by us.

We are looking for a Principal Engineer to join our Information Technology team to be part of this effort. This is not a support role or a tools administrator position. It is a senior engineering role for someone who can look at a $500,000 annual SaaS contract and ask: 'Could we build a better version of this on Elasticsearch in twelve weeks?' — and then go do it.

This is a rare opportunity to do original product engineering inside an IT organization, working with a platform that most engineers only get to use as a customer — and to build systems that directly shape how a public company operates.

What You Will Be Doing

Lead strategic build-vs-buy Engineering

You will work with IT leadership, Finance, and Engineering to evaluate Elastic's internal SaaS portfolio and identify where custom-built systems — backed by Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Elastic's AI capabilities — deliver better value than continued vendor contracts. You will own the architecture, engineering systems, build plan, and delivery of the highest-priority replacements.

Design and build Elastic-native internal platforms

The project portfolio spans four areas where the build-vs-buy shift is most compelling:

• Platform productivity tools — internal developer portals, knowledge search layers, engineering onboarding systems, and workspace tooling that unifies disparate SaaS tools into a single Elasticsearch-backed search and intelligence layer.
• FinOps and AI cost governance — a consolidated cost visibility and anomaly detection system across Elastic's AI providers (Anthropic, OpenAI Codex, GitHub Copilot, Google Gemini) and cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), replacing commercial FinOps SaaS with an Elastic ML-powered alternative.
• IT service management — evaluating and building replacements for commercially purchased SaaS products including incident management, knowledge base search, internal developer portal, and SIEM-correlated security workflows, using Elastic Observability and Elastic Security as the backbone.
• Enterprise efficiency systems — custom tooling that reduces manual process overhead across IT, Finance, HR, and Operations, using the LLM Gateway, RAG pipelines, and Elasticsearch as the data and intelligence layer.

Set the engineering standard

As a Principal Engineer, you will establish and own the architectural standards, design patterns, and engineering practices for all IT platform engineering work. You will define how internal systems are built — data models, API design, observability, cost governance, security posture — and be the technical authority others look to when decisions get hard.

Collaborate across the company

You will partner closely with Elastic's IT infrastructure team, the Security organization (Elastic Security is your SIEM backbone), the Platform Engineering team, and Finance. You will engage with tool owners across the company to understand requirements, challenge assumptions about what needs to be bought versus built and ensure that the systems you build actually get used.

Dogfood and validate Elastic's own products

A significant part of the role is running Elastic's own technology in the most demanding possible context: as the engineer responsible for the internal systems that the company depends on every day. Every system you build is a reference architecture. Every insight you generate about what works and what doesn't feed directly into Elastic's product and go-to-market strategy.

What You Bring

• 15+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 years as a principal engineer.
• Deep, hands-on expertise with Elasticsearch — data modelling, query design, aggregations, performance tuning, and production operations. This is not a role for someone who has read the documentation; we need someone who has run Elasticsearch at scale and can debug it in production.
• Strong full-stack engineering capability: you can build and own a system end-to-end, from Logstash ingest pipelines to Kibana dashboards to a React frontend, without needing to hand off each layer to a different team.
• Proven track record of building and shipping commercial software or platform systems — not just maintaining existing ones. We want to see examples of systems you originated and delivered.
• Architectural judgment: the ability to scope a problem correctly, choose the right components, and make the call on when to build versus integrate versus buy. You have opinions about this, and you can defend them with data.
• Strong written communication. You will write architecture decision records, engineering standards documents, and build-vs-buy analyses. Your writing needs to be clear and persuasive to both engineering and non-engineering audiences.

Bonus Points

• Prior experience building on the Elastic Stack beyond basic logging — Elastic ML, ELSER semantic search, vector search, Kibana Canvas, Watcher, or Elastic Security.
• Experience with FinOps practices: cloud cost management, LLM API cost attribution, or building cost visibility tooling.
• Familiarity with Information Technology managed systems — not necessarily Salesforce or ServiceNow expertise, but an understanding of the domain problems these tools solve.
• Experience working in a hypergrowth or post-IPO technology company where engineering rigor and business speed have to coexist.
• Experience with LLM integration patterns: RAG pipelines, prompt engineering for enterprise use cases, LLM gateway design, or AI-powered workflow automation.
• Contributions to internal developer experience, platform engineering, or engineering productivity tooling.

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:

$135,700—$214,700 USD

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

$163,100—$258,100 USD

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 minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave

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 us.fitly.work . We will reply to your request within 24 business hours of submission.

Applicants have rights under Federal Employment Laws, view posters linked below: Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) Poster; Pay Transparency Nondiscrimination Provision Poster; Employee Polygraph Protection Act (EPPA) Poster and Know Your Rights (Poster)

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