Senior Java Engineer - Core/Infra - 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. What Is the Role We are on the lookout for a Senior Java Engineer to join our Elasticsearch team and focus on ensuring that the shared platform functionalities of Elasticsearch are easy to use, performant, maintainable and secure. The team’s mission is to create foundational infrastructure and shared functionality that enables engineers to develop, extend, and support Elasticsearch. The team owns common functionality such as services, settings and scripting, and makes Elasticsearch extensible through plugins or the Painless scripting language. The team also makes Elasticsearch observable by providing logging and telemetry information. We also own the orchestration of Elasticsearch in serverless, the CI/CD workflows and enable Elasticsearch developers to deliver Elasticsearch to customers - serverless, cloud and on-premise alike. 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 drive and communicate technical concepts across a variety of collaborators. What You Will Be Doing • Contributing to large, impactful projects that evolve the core infrastructure that underpins Elasticsearch. • Making Elasticsearch developers more productive by identifying and developing opportunities for automation, and integrating agentic apps into development workflows. • Designing and implementing new horizontally-scalable features and APIs in Elasticsearch. • Solving difficult issues, including performance or concurrency issues, and proposing solutions. • Improving operation and observability of Elasticsearch cloud systems. • Collaborating in the open with the ES team, Elastic users, and other supporting open source projects. • Supporting our support engineers with the harder problems. • Owning operational investigations end-to-end, until performance or stability issues are successfully resolved. What You Bring • Experience crafting APIs and the ability to reason through tradeoffs. • Proficiency in algorithms and data structures. • Strong skills in core Java and are conversant in the standard library of data structures and concurrency constructs, as well as newer language features. • Experience with low-level Java such as concurrency, parallelism, classloaders, etc. • Knowledge of JDK internals: modules, the Java memory model, garbage collection, database load, caching techniques, etc. • Experience leading large scale projects across engineering teams. • Willingness to dive into new issues and ask for help when you need it. • You are able to own projects from beginning to end. This covers both technical design and working with others to develop needed components. • 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 possess the ability to collaborate across functions and teams and seamlessly transition between different projects, codebases, or teams based on business priorities • You can work autonomously, drive decisions and results in a distributed team by leveraging asynchronous, direct, and transparent communication. Bonus Points • Experience working in a platform team or developer productivity team • Hands-on experience with CI/CD systems and practices (Buildkite, Argo CD, GitOps etc). • Knowledge of Java build tools (Gradle, Maven, etc), with a strong preference for Gradle experience. • Experience with observability and telemetry solutions, particularly OpenTelemetry • Knowledge of Go • Knowledge of containers and Kubernetes Compensation for this role is in the form of base salary. This role does not have a variable compensation component. The typical starting salary range for new hires in this role is listed below. In select locations (including Seattle WA, Los Angeles CA, the San Francisco Bay Area CA, and the New York City Metro Area), an alternate range may apply as specified below. These ranges represent the lowest to highest salary we reasonably and in good faith believe we would pay for this role at the time of this posting. We may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range, and the ranges may be modified in the future. An employee's position within the salary range will be based on several factors including, but not limited to, relevant education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, geographic location, performance, and business or organizational needs. Elastic believes that employees should have the opportunity to share in the value that we create together for our shareholders. Therefore, in addition to cash compensation, this role is currently eligible to participate in Elastic's stock program. Our total rewards package also includes a company-matched 401k with dollar-for-dollar matching up to 6% of eligible earnings, along with a range of other benefits offered with a holistic emphasis on employee well-being. The typical starting salary range for this role is: $133,100—$210,600 USD The typical starting salary range for this role in the select locations listed above is: $159,900—$252,900 USD Additional Information - We Take Care of Our People As a distributed company, diversity drives our identity. Whether you’re looking to launch a ne