Principal Software Engineer - Search Scaling - 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.

We're looking for a Principal Software Engineer to join the Elasticsearch - Search Scaling team. This globally-distributed team of experienced engineers focuses on delivering a robust and feature-rich search experience, including contributing to improving the search experience in Lucene. This is a principal software engineering role that entails using your vast knowledge in this space in order to define, direct, and build the next generation of Elasticsearch capabilities.

This role provides technical vision and direction for Elasticsearch’s core search infrastructure, including indexing, retrieval, and relevance, and requires deep expertise in search internals and cross-team collaboration.

Our company is distributed by intention. We hire the best engineers we can find wherever they are, whoever they are. We collaborate across continents every day over email, Git Hub, Zoom, and Slack. At our best, we write fast, scalable and intuitive software. We believe that the best way to do that is to empower individual engineers, code review every change, decide big things by consensus, and strive for incremental improvements.

As a full-time Elasticsearch contributor, you will define, lead, and contribute to the evolution of core search and indexing capabilities. You’ll research advances in search infrastructure, data structures, and retrieval algorithms to ensure we’re building the most efficient and powerful foundations for our users. You’ll work closely with our partners and product teams to understand their needs and help shape the long‑term technical vision for search ’ll bring your past experience with large‑scale search systems to drive an innovative roadmap for Elasticsearch’s indexing, query execution, and relevance layers.

As an authority in several areas of Elasticsearch, you’ll be the go‑to expert for those domains, continuously improving them through your insights and instincts.

• Experience leading technical projects in the search infrastructure and distributed systems space. You bring proven knowledge in building and operating sophisticated search platforms and engineering robust, high‑performance software systems.
• Experience mentoring expert engineers, providing both technical and professional guidance.
• Experience defining a long‑term technical vision for a core search or retrieval system, working across teams and organizations to collaboratively shape the technical roadmap.
• Hands‑on experience with search and indexing technologies such as Elasticsearch, Lucene, or Solr.
• Strong skills in core Java and familiarity with advanced data structures and concurrency constructs, as well as newer language features like lambdas. You have a strong desire to optimize and leverage the most efficient algorithms and search data structures.
• Able to work with a high level of autonomy, tackling projects and guiding them from concept to completion, including both technical design and collaboration with other engineers to develop the necessary components.
• Experience with large‑scale data or search systems such as Elasticsearch, Lucene, Solr, or distributed storage engines, and an understanding of how they work and why they work that way.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills. Collaborating across distributed teams is challenging, we value being supportive, empathetic, and trusting in all interactions, and we expect the same from everyone on the team.

• You've built things with Elasticsearch before, and you have experience in…