Senior Java Engineer - Core/Infra - Elasticsearch

Elastic

13h • $133,100 - $210,600 • Remote

About The Position

Elastic is seeking a Senior Software Developer for its Elasticsearch team to help ensure shared Elasticsearch platform functionality is easy to use, performant, maintainable, and secure. The team creates foundational infrastructure and shared functionality, including services, settings, scripting, plugins, Painless, logging, telemetry, serverless orchestration, and CI/CD workflows. This infrastructure enables engineers to develop, extend, support, and deliver Elasticsearch across serverless, cloud, and on-premise environments.

The role is a strong individual-contributor position that also involves contributing to and leading cross-team projects. It requires sound design skills, the ability to work at a low level of abstraction, and the ability to communicate technical concepts with a range of collaborators. The engineer will develop core infrastructure, improve developer productivity and system operations, resolve complex performance and stability issues, and collaborate with the Elasticsearch team, Elastic users, and open-source projects.

The role offers base salary without variable compensation. The typical starting salary range is $133,100–$210,600 USD, or $159,900–$252,900 USD in the listed select locations. The role is currently eligible for Elastic’s stock program. The rewards package includes company-matched 401(k) contributions and other benefits focused on employee well-being. Elastic is a distributed, equal-opportunity employer and strives to provide an inclusive and accessible workplace.

Requirements

• Experience crafting APIs and reasoning through tradeoffs.
• Proficiency in algorithms and data structures.
• Strong core Java skills, including familiarity with standard-library data structures, concurrency constructs, and newer language features.
• Experience with low-level Java, such as concurrency, parallelism, or classloaders.
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD systems and practices, such as Buildkite, Argo CD, or GitOps.
• Experience leading large-scale projects across engineering teams.
• Ability and willingness to investigate new issues and ask for help when needed.
• Ability to own projects from beginning to end, including technical design and collaborating on needed components.
• Proven experience using AI to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimize code while owning the final outcomes.
• Ability to collaborate across functions and teams and transition among projects, codebases, or teams according to business priorities.
• Ability to work autonomously and drive decisions and results in a distributed team through asynchronous, direct, and transparent communication.

Nice To Haves

• Knowledge of JDK internals, including modules, the Java memory model, garbage collection, database load, or caching techniques.
• Experience with observability and telemetry solutions, particularly OpenTelemetry.
• Knowledge of Go.
• Knowledge of containers and Kubernetes.
• Knowledge of Java build tools such as Gradle or Maven; Gradle experience is strongly preferred.
• Experience working in a platform team or developer productivity team.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to large, impactful projects that evolve Elasticsearch’s core infrastructure.
• 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 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.
• Contribute to and lead cross-team projects, including technical design and development of required components.

Benefits

• Company-matched 401(k), with dollar-for-dollar matching up to 6% of eligible earnings.
• Eligibility to participate in Elastic’s stock program.
• Health coverage for employees and their families in many locations.
• Flexible locations and schedules for many roles.
• Generous annual vacation days.
• Matching of financial donations and service contributions up to $2,000 or local currency equivalent.
• Up to 40 hours per year for volunteer projects.
• At least 16 weeks of parental leave.
• Competitive pay based on the work performed, not previous salary.

What This Job Offers

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