Elasticsearch - Principal Java Engineer - Performance Tuning (JDK, Lucene)

United Kingdom

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 Senior/Principal Java Engineer to join our Elasticsearch team. This role specializes in deep, low-level performance engineering at the Elasticsearch code level and lower (Lucene, JDK). The focus of the role will rotate across different areas, such as logging, metrics, vector search, and ES|QL, partnering with existing area-specific teams to maximize the performance of their features.

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. Effective written communication skills are important.

At our best, we write fast, scalable, and intuitive software. We believe that the best way to do that is to code review for every change, decide big things by consensus, and strive for incremental improvements. We believe the team should be aware of how our customers (both technical and non-technical) use our products and be empowered to make bold and impactful decisions.

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.

What You Will Be Doing

• Shaping how Elasticsearch runs in Elastic Cloud
• Optimizing low-level code to improve speed, efficiency, and scalability across Elasticsearch
• Solving difficult problems, involving data structures and concurrency, and driving solutions
• Partnering with area teams to co-design, profile, and tune features
• Collaborating in the open with the ES team, Elastic users, and other supporting open source projects
• Share best practices and tools to strengthen long-term performance culture
• Supporting our support engineers with the harder problems

What You Bring

• Experience profiling and applying optimizations to code
• Proficient in algorithms and data structures
• Experience crafting APIs and the ability to reason through tradeoffs
• 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

Bonus Points

• Experience with JMH (Java Microbenchmark Harness)
• Hands-on use of recent Java Panama APIs, or JNI

Additional Information - We Take Care of Our People

As a distributed company, diversity drives our identity. We welcome people from diverse backgrounds and strive to balance great work with great life. We strive to have parity of benefits across regions; regulations differ by location, but we are committed to taking care of our people.

• 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
• Up to $2000 (or local currency equivalent) matching for charitable donations
• Up to 40 hours each year to use toward volunteer projects
• Parental leave with a minimum of 16 weeks

Diversity, equity, and inclusion are fundamental to Elastic. Elastic is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, ethnicity, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, disability status, or any other basis protected by law.

We welcome individuals with disabilities and strive to create an accessible and inclusive experience for all. To request an accommodation during the application or recruitment process, please email candidate_accessibility@elastic.co. We will reply within 24 business hours of submission.

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