Principal Software Engineer - Storage Engine - Elasticsearch

What is The Role

We're looking for a Principal Software Engineer to join the Elasticsearch - Storage Engine team.  This globally distributed, fully remote team of experienced engineers develops core storage and query technologies for observability workloads, including improving storage efficiency, advancing ES|QL query processing and performance, and optimizing data layouts for object storage.

This role is responsible for driving the technical vision, architecture, and design of Elasticsearch's core storage and query engine. The ideal candidate has a proven track record of designing high-performance, scalable database or search engine technologies, along with the ability to drive technical initiatives across organizations.

Our company is distributed by intention. We hire the best developers we can find wherever they are, whoever they are. We collaborate across continents every day over email, GitHub, 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.

What You Will Be Doing

• Lead the architectural evolution of core storage engine components, continuously identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks in indexing layouts, serialization formats, and resource utilization.
• Lead cross organizational initiatives to drive and build industry-leading observability solutions.
• Work with a globally distributed team of experienced engineers focused on the logs and metrics capabilities of Elasticsearch.
• Drive continuous operational and system improvements by introducing best practices for clean coding standards, demystifying complex system behaviors, untangling complexity to bring architectural clarity across the platform.
• Serve as a subject matter expert (SME) across key areas of Elasticsearch, acting as a trusted technical advisor and mentor to the wider engineering organization.
• Work with a global community to triage, resolve, and review issues and pull requests, collaborating with domain experts as needed.
• Write idiomatic modern Java -- Elasticsearch is 99.8% Java!

What You Bring

• You possess the ability to collaborate across functions and teams and seamlessly transition between different projects, codebases, or teams based on business priorities
• You work autonomously and can drive decisions and results in a distributed team by leveraging asynchronous, direct, and transparent communication.
• You have a proven track record of using AI to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimize code, while still owning the final outcomes.
• You bring a prompt-engineering mindset to know how to leverage AI agents effectively, using sound engineering judgment to validate results and recognize its limitations.
• You have implemented novel techniques to efficiently index, store, and query time-series or logs data.
• You have experience with one or more data storage technologies like Elasticsearch, Solr, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, or Prometheus and have some idea how they work and why they work that way.
• You have strong core Java skills, a deep understanding of its concurrency primitives, with a proven ability to design and optimize efficient data structures and algorithms.
• You excel in a collaborative environment, actively participate in technical discussions, and work effectively across distributed teams. Because it's the best way we know how to build software.
• You have excellent verbal and written communication skills and collaborate with respect, empathy, and professionalism in a distributed team.

Bonus Points

• You've built things with Elasticsearch before.
• You've worked with open source projects and are familiar with different styles of source control workflow and continuous integration.
• You’ve worked on data storage technology.
• You have experience designing, leading, and owning cross-functional initiatives.
• You have past working experience with database, search engine, OS, or cloud service development.