Senior Platform Productivity Engineer - Core/Infra - Elasticsearch

Elastic

12h • $133,100 - $252,900

About The Position

Elastic is seeking a Senior Platform Productivity Engineer to join its Elasticsearch team. The role focuses on making Elasticsearch’s shared platform functionality easy to use, performant, maintainable, and secure. The team builds foundational infrastructure and shared functionality that helps engineers develop, extend, and support Elasticsearch. Its areas of ownership include common services, settings and scripting; extensibility through plugins and the Painless scripting language; logging and telemetry; orchestration of Elasticsearch in serverless; and CI/CD workflows for delivering Elasticsearch to serverless, cloud, and on-premise customers.

The successful candidate will be a strong individual contributor who also contributes to and leads cross-team projects. The role requires sound design skills, the ability to work at a low level of abstraction, and the ability to communicate technical concepts to a range of collaborators. The engineer will develop core infrastructure, improve developer productivity and cloud operations, and own investigations into performance and stability issues through resolution.

This is a distributed-company role. Elastic describes flexible locations and schedules for many roles. Compensation is base salary, with no variable compensation component. The typical starting salary range is $133,100–$210,600 USD, or $159,900–$252,900 USD in the specified select locations. The role is also currently eligible for Elastic’s stock program.

Requirements

• Hands-on experience with CI/CD systems and practices, such as Buildkite, Argo CD, and GitOps.
• Experience crafting APIs and reasoning through tradeoffs.
• Proficiency in algorithms and data structures.
• Experience with core Java and familiarity with standard-library data structures and concurrency constructs, as well as newer Java language features.
• Knowledge of Java build tools such as Gradle or Maven; Gradle experience is strongly preferred.
• Experience working with large codebases containing millions of lines of code.
• 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.
• Proven track record of using AI to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimize code while remaining accountable for outcomes.
• Ability to collaborate across functions and teams and transition between projects, codebases, or teams according to 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 working in a platform or developer productivity team.
• Experience with low-level Java topics such as concurrency, parallelism, or classloaders.
• Knowledge of JDK internals, including modules, the Java memory model, garbage collection, database load, and caching techniques.
• Experience with observability and telemetry solutions, particularly OpenTelemetry.
• Knowledge of Go.
• Knowledge of containers and Kubernetes.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to large, impactful projects that evolve the core infrastructure underlying Elasticsearch.
• Identify and develop automation opportunities and integrate agentic applications into development workflows to improve Elasticsearch developer productivity.
• Design and implement new 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 difficult 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 needed components.

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 annual vacation days.
• Matching of financial donations and service contributions up to $2,000 or local-currency equivalent.
• Up to 40 hours each 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