Search - Search Inference - Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Search - Search Inference - Senior Site Reliability 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.

The Search Inference team is responsible for bringing performant, ergonomic, and cost effective machine learning (ML) model inference to Search workflows. ML inference has become a crucial part of the modern search experience whether used for query understanding, semantic search, RAG, or any other GenAI use‑case. Our goal is to simplify ML inference in Search workflows by focusing on large scale inference capabilities for embeddings and reranking models that are available across the Elasticsearch user base.

As a team, we are a collaborative, cross‑functional group with backgrounds in information retrieval, natural language processing, and distributed systems. We work with Go services, Python, Ray Serve, Kubernetes/Kube Ray, and work in AWS, GCP & Azure. We provide thought leadership across a variety of mediums including open code repositories, publishing blogs, and speaking  focus on matching the expectations of our customers along the lines of throughput, latency, and cost.

We’re seeking an experienced Senior Site Reliability Engineer to help us deliver on this vision!

• Working with the wider team to evolve our inference service so it may scale efficiently and reliably, hosting a growing number of models for semantic search, agentic workflows and foundation models.
• Ensuring proactive monitoring and SLO‑based alerting using error budgets to prevent incidents before they happen.
• Enhancing the scalability and reliability of the service and partnering with the team to ensure knowledge is shared, clear documentation is produced, and best practices are followed.
• Growing our global infrastructure to meet increasing scaling demands by developing and maintaining software, tooling, and automations.
• Collaborating in an inclusive environment, focusing on operational excellence and uplifting each other with constructive feedback.
• Being part of an SRE on‑call rotation responding to operational needs and incidents.

• 5+ years of experience in a site reliability engineer (or equivalent) role, operating services in production at scale.
• 3+ years of experience with Kubernetes, Helm & containerised services.
• Experience Terraform/Pulumi/Crossplane or similar.
• Experience writing non‑trivial code in a language like Python, Go, or equivalent.
• Strong Linux fundamentals, experience writing Bash scripts.
• Strong written communication.

Experience working with Ray and Kube Ray is a big plus! Experience working with the Elastic Observability Stack.

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…