Senior Java Developer - Core/Infra - Elasticsearch

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

We are on the lookout for a Senior Software Developer to join our Elasticsearch team and focus on ensuring that the shared platform functionalities of Elasticsearch are easy to use, performant, maintainable, and secure.

The team’s mission is to create foundational infrastructure and shared functionality that enables engineers to develop, extend, and support Elasticsearch. The team owns common functionality such as services, settings, and scripting, and makes Elasticsearch extensible through plugins or the Painless scripting language. The team also makes Elasticsearch observable by providing logging and telemetry information. We also own the orchestration of Elasticsearch in serverless, the CI/CD workflows, and enable Elasticsearch developers to deliver Elasticsearch to customers - serverless, cloud, and on-premise alike.

You will be a strong individual contributor on the team, but you will also contribute to and lead cross-team projects. We need someone who has great design skills, who can work at a low level of abstraction but can equally drive and communicate technical concepts across a variety of collaborators.

What You Will Be Doing

• Contributing to large, impactful projects that evolve the core infrastructure that underpins Elasticsearch.


• Making Elasticsearch developers more productive by identifying and developing opportunities for automation, and integrating agentic apps into development workflows.


• Designing and implementing new horizontally-scalable features and APIs in Elasticsearch.


• Solving difficult issues, including performance or concurrency issues, and proposing solutions.


• Improving operation and observability of Elasticsearch cloud systems.


• Collaborating in the open with the ES team, Elastic users, and other supporting open source projects.


• Supporting our support engineers with the harder problems.


• Owning operational investigations end-to-end, until performance or stability issues are successfully resolved.

What You Bring 

• Experience crafting APIs and the ability to reason through tradeoffs.


• Proficient in algorithms and data structures.


• You have strong skills in core Java and are conversant in the standard library of data structures and concurrency constructs, as well as newer language features.


• Experience with low-level Java such as concurrency, parallelism, classloaders, etc.


• Hands-on experience with CI/CD systems and practices (Buildkite, Argo CD, GitOps etc).


• Experience leading large scale projects across engineering teams.


• Willingness to dive into new issues and ask for help when you need it.


• You are able to own projects from beginning to end. This covers both technical design and working with others to develop needed components.


• You have a proven track record of using AI to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimize code, while still owning the final outcomes.


• You possess the ability to collaborate across functions and teams and seamlessly transition between different projects, codebases, or teams based on business priorities


• You can work autonomously, drive decisions and results in a distributed team by leveraging asynchronous, direct, and transparent communication.

Bonus Points

• Knowledge of JDK internals: modules, the Java memory model, garbage collection, database load, caching techniques, etc.


• Experience with observability and telemetry solutions, particularly OpenTelemetry


• Knowledge of Go


• Knowledge of containers and Kubernetes


• Knowledge of Java build tools (Gradle, Maven, etc), with a strong preference for Gradle experience.


• Experience working in a platform team or developer productivity team