Principal Software Engineer - Platform Billing Core

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.

Billing powers Elastic's Cloud business. It runs across AWS, GCP, and Azure in over 50 regions. We oversee usage‑based metering, consumption billing, and marketplace integrations at global scale.

The Billing Core team owns the data layer that makes billing correct, auditable, and automated. We work across two areas:

• Usage — Collect and process usage and cost data. This data is the foundation of our billing and financial reporting.
• Engine — Turn hourly usage data into customer invoices and revenue records.

We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to drive technical direction within the Billing Core domain. This is a hands‑on role. You will design systems, improve how we operate, and work across teams. You will help our billing services grow in scale, reliability, and developer productivity. You will work closely with Product, SRE, and Cloud Infrastructure teams.

• Own complex billing and account management systems that span multiple services and cloud providers.
• Build large‑scale data pipelines for billing data ingestion, transformation, and reconciliation.
• Improve observability, incident response, and reliability of core billing systems using modern Dev Ops practices.
• Shape system architecture for scale and modularity. Guide service design, API structure, and data modelling.
• Work with SRE and Cloud teams to improve deployment, monitoring, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Own PostgreSQL data architecture and performance. Focus on query speed, schema quality, and high availability.
• Be the go‑to technical reviewer for the billing core stack. Maintain technical consistency and quality standards.
• Mentor engineers and tech leads across the Billing organization. Help raise the bar on design and operational standards.
• Work with Product, Design, and Finance to set roadmap priorities. Make sure plans are feasible and aligned with business goals.
• Take part in on‑call rotations. Make sure systems are production‑ready through automation, resilience testing, and alerting.

• 8+ years in backend or platform engineering, with solid skills in Python and PostgreSQL (schema design, performance, high availability).
• Proven experience improving reliability, observability, and incident response in production systems.
• Solid background in cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including networking, IAM, monitoring, and deployment.
• Ability to lead multi‑quarter projects across teams — building consensus and delivering results.
• Track record of mentoring engineers, setting technical direction, and raising engineering standards.
• Experience with SaaS billing, metering, or financial systems is a real plus.
• Clear written and verbal communication skills. Able to influence across teams and speak to both technical and non‑technical partners.
• Comfortable working on your own in a global, distributed, and async environment.
• Able to work across projects, work across functions and teams, and adapt to changing team structures.
• Track record of using AI to speed up development, debug complex systems, and improve code quality — while owning the outcomes.
• Eligible to work in…