Senior Java Engineer - Core / Infra - Elasticsearch

Elastic is a Search AI company providing a cloud-based platform for search, security, and observability, used by more than 50% of the Fortune 500. The team works on foundational infrastructure and shared functionality for Elasticsearch, including services, settings, scripting, observability, orchestration in serverless, CI/CD workflows, and product delivery across serverless, cloud, and on-premise environments.

• Experience crafting APIs with ability to reason through tradeoffs.
• Proficient in algorithms and data structures.
• Strong skills in core Java, including standard library data structures and concurrency constructs, and newer language features.
• Experience with low-level Java concepts such as concurrency, parallelism, and classloaders.
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD systems and practices (e.g., Buildkite, Argo CD, GitOps).
• Experience leading large-scale projects across engineering teams.
• Ability to independently own projects end-to-end, including design and collaboration.
• Proven track record of using AI to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimize code.
• Ability to collaborate across functions and transition between codebases or teams.
• Ability to work autonomously and drive results in a distributed team using asynchronous communication.

Nice to have:

• Knowledge of JDK internals: modules, memory model, garbage collection, caching.
• Experience with observability and telemetry solutions, especially OpenTelemetry.
• Knowledge of Go.
• Knowledge of containers and Kubernetes.
• Experience with Java build tools such as Gradle and Maven, with preference for Gradle.
• Experience in platform or developer productivity teams.

• Contribute to large, impactful projects evolving Elasticsearch core infrastructure.
• Identify and develop automation opportunities to improve developer productivity.
• Design and implement new horizontally-scalable features and APIs.
• Solve performance, concurrency, and other difficult technical issues.
• Improve operation and observability of Elasticsearch cloud systems.
• Collaborate with the Elasticsearch team, users, and open source projects.
• Support support engineers with complex problems.
• Own operational investigations from start to resolution of performance or stability issues.

Employment eligibility may require export licenses for nationals or residents of Belarus, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Russia, or certain Ukrainian territories annexed by Russia. Elastic is an equal opportunity employer committed to inclusiveness regardless of various protected statuses. Applicants have rights under applicable federal employment laws.