Senior Go/Kubernetes Engineer - Core/Infra - Elasticsearch

Elastic

13h • $133,100 - $252,900

About The Position

Elastic is seeking a Senior Kubernetes/Go Engineer to join its Elasticsearch team and help ensure shared platform functionality is easy to use, performant, maintainable, and secure. The team builds foundational infrastructure and shared functionality that enables engineers to develop, extend, and support Elasticsearch. Its scope includes common services, settings and scripting; extensibility through plugins and Painless; logging and telemetry; orchestration of Elasticsearch in serverless; and CI/CD workflows that deliver Elasticsearch to customers in serverless, cloud, and on-premise environments.

The role is a strong individual-contributor position that also involves contributing to and leading cross-team projects. The engineer will design and build distributed systems for orchestrating Serverless Elasticsearch, own Kubernetes orchestration of Elasticsearch clusters in the cloud, evolve Elasticsearch infrastructure and features, and improve developer productivity, operations, and observability. The role calls for strong technical design and the ability to work at low levels of abstraction while communicating technical concepts across collaborators.

The position is distributed. Elastic describes flexible locations and schedules for many roles. Compensation is base salary, with no variable compensation component, and the role is currently eligible for participation in Elastic's stock program. The typical starting salary range is $133,100–$210,600 USD; an alternate range of $159,900–$252,900 USD applies in select locations, including Seattle, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, and the New York City Metro Area.

Requirements

• Strong Go skills, including fluency with goroutines, channels, sync, context, idiomatic error handling, and generics.
• Hands-on experience with containers and Kubernetes.
• Experience crafting APIs and reasoning through tradeoffs.
• Proficiency in algorithms and data structures.
• Experience leading large-scale projects across engineering teams.
• Willingness to investigate new issues and ask for help when needed.
• Ability to own projects from beginning to end, including technical design and working with others to develop required components.
• A proven track record of using AI to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimize code while retaining ownership of outcomes.
• Ability to collaborate across functions and teams and transition between projects, codebases, or teams based on business priorities.
• Ability to work autonomously and drive decisions and results in a distributed team using asynchronous, direct, and transparent communication.

Nice To Haves

• Experience building Kubernetes controllers using controller-runtime or client-go.
• Experience with Java and the standard Java library's data structures and concurrency constructs.
• Knowledge of JDK internals, including modules, the Java memory model, garbage collection, database load, and caching techniques.
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD systems and practices such as Buildkite, Argo CD, or GitOps.
• Knowledge of Java build tools such as Gradle or Maven; Gradle experience is strongly preferred.
• Experience with observability and telemetry solutions, particularly OpenTelemetry.
• Experience working on a platform team or developer productivity team.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and evolve distributed systems that orchestrate and manage Serverless Elasticsearch projects across cloud service providers.
• Contribute to large, impactful projects that evolve the core infrastructure underpinning Elasticsearch.
• Own Kubernetes orchestration of Elasticsearch clusters in the cloud.
• Identify and develop automation opportunities and integrate agentic applications into development workflows to improve developer productivity.
• Design and implement horizontally scalable Elasticsearch features and APIs.
• Investigate and solve difficult issues, including performance and concurrency problems, and propose solutions.
• Improve the operation and observability of Elasticsearch cloud systems.
• Collaborate openly with the Elasticsearch team, Elastic users, and supporting open-source projects.
• Support support engineers with complex problems.
• Own operational investigations end-to-end until performance or stability issues are resolved.
• Lead and contribute to cross-team projects, including technical design and development of required components.
• Use AI to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimize code while owning the resulting outcomes.
• Drive decisions and results autonomously in a distributed team through asynchronous, direct, and transparent communication.

Benefits

• Company-matched 401(k), with dollar-for-dollar matching up to 6% of eligible earnings.
• Stock program eligibility.
• Health coverage for employees and their families in many locations.
• Flexible locations and schedules for many roles.
• Generous vacation days each year.
• Matching of financial donations and service up to $2,000 or local currency equivalent.
• Up to 40 hours each year for volunteer projects.
• At least 16 weeks of parental leave.
• A range of benefits with an emphasis on employee well-being.

What This Job Offers

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