Principal Software Engineer I - Platform Billing Experience

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 : 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 Experience team owns the customer-facing layer of our billing systems. We build and maintain the public and internal APIs, as well as the billing and account pages within Elastic Cloud consoles. Our goal is to make it easy for customers and internal teams to understand and manage their billing data. We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to drive technical direction within the Billing Experience domain. This is a hands-on role. You will design APIs, shape user-facing systems, and work across teams. You will help our billing services grow in scale, reliability, and developer productivity. You will work closely with Product, Design, SRE, and Cloud Infrastructure teams. What You Will Be Doing : • Own complex billing and account management systems, including public APIs, internal APIs, and Cloud console experiences. • Lead API design and evolution — set standards for contract stability, versioning, and developer experience across internal and external consumers. • Build and improve full-stack features in Elastic Cloud consoles, from backend services to frontend billing and account UIs. • Improve observability, incident response, and reliability of billing-facing services using modern DevOps practices. • Shape system architecture for scale and modularity. Guide service design, API structure, and data modeling. • Work with SRE and Cloud teams to improve deployment, monitoring, and CI/CD pipelines. • Be the go-to technical reviewer for the billing experience 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. What You Bring : • 8+ years in backend or full-stack engineering, with solid skills in API design and development. • Proven experience building and maintaining developer-facing or customer-facing APIs at scale. • Solid background in cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including networking, IAM, monitoring, and deployment. • Experience with frontend technologies used in console or dashboard products is a plus (React or similar). • 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, collaborate across functions and teams, and adapt to changing team structures. • Track record of using AI to accelerate up development, debug complex systems, and improve code quality — while owning the outcomes. • Eligible to work in Department of Defense (DoD) Impact Level 4 or above cloud service environments. 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: $159,800—$252,800 USD The typical starting salary range for this role in the select locations listed above is: $191,900—$303,500 USD Additional Information - We Take Care of Our People 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 o