Control Plane - Serverless Core - Software Engineering Manager

Elastic

4d • Remote

About The Position

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
The Control Plane Serverless Team builds and maintains the platform that allows Elastic’s products and customers to enjoy a flawless experience. We focus on abstracting away the complexities of the underlying environment so our users can focus on what matters most to them. Our team is responsible for the critical services and domains—like Kubernetes controllers and internal APIs—that orchestrate global deployments. We are builders at heart!
Are you a leader who is a manager first, but still loves to dive into the technical details of distributed systems? We seek an Engineering Manager to guide a team that is responsible for a key portion of our Serverless Control Plane. We need someone who can truly understand the "how" and "why" of the work to ensure our services remain robust as we scale together.
We are a distributed team, with about half of us based in Europe. To make sure we have enough time to collaborate in real-time, we are looking for teammates in EMEA or the Americas. If you’re in the Americas, we have a preference for the Eastern Timezone (EST) so we can maintain that "golden window" of collaboration with our European colleagues.

Requirements

• Management Experience: 2+ years of experience leading people, with a focus on mentoring and talent development.
• Technical Foundation: A background in Software Engineering, SRE, or DevOps that allows you to read code and guide senior engineers through problems.
• Golang Proficiency: While you will not be shipping code to production, familiarity with Golang patterns and software engineering best practises is important to us, as our entire part of the stack is built on it.
• Strategic Approach: Experience helping a team plan its roadmap and forecast capacity in a fast paced environment.
• Distributed Leadership: Experience leading remote, asynchronous teams across different time zones and countries.
• Communication: A knack for explaining technical strategy and progress to all kinds of interested parties, whether they are technical or not.

Nice To Haves

• Elastic Stack Expertise: Prior experience with Elasticsearch, Kibana, or deployment models like ECK and ECE.
• Cloud-Native Depth: Practical experience with Kubernetes Operators, CRDs, or GitOps (Argo CD) as well as experience with one of the main public CSPs (GCP, AWS, Azure).
• Operational Automation: Proficiency in building GitHub Actions, Dashboards, and/or custom tools to streamline project management and reporting.
• SaaS at Scale: Previous success leading teams that support high-scale, multi-tenant global platforms.

Responsibilities

• People & Talent Management: We believe in leading and empowering our people. You will mentor a team of versatile software engineers, encouraging a culture that is committed to performance, psychological safety, and continuous learning! You will be responsible for the entire employee lifecycle, from your first hire to helping your team members reach their next promotion.
• Strategy & Execution: How do we turn big ideas into reality? You’ll work with our Product and Control Plane Leadership teams to navigate planning cycles, working together to translate business requirements into clear engineering achievements. You’ll act as a bridge, ensuring our APIs and services meet the needs of our internal customers while we maintain the integrity of the platform.
• Technical & Operational Leadership: We take full accountability for our services. You’ll partner with your Technical Lead to facilitate technical discussions, navigate trade-offs, and drive the team to build balanced, high-quality services. You will also be part of our Incident Commander (IC) on-call rotation, providing leadership during critical service disruptions to keep our platform production-ready.

Benefits

• Competitive pay based on the work you do here and not your previous salary
• Health coverage for you and your family in many locations
• Ability to craft your calendar with flexible locations and schedules for many roles
• Generous number of vacation days each year
• Increase your impact - We match up to $2000 (or local currency equivalent) for financial donations and service
• Up to 40 hours each year to use toward volunteer projects you love
• Embracing parenthood with minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Manager
• Education Level: No Education Listed