Senior Java Engineer – Core / Infra – Elasticsearch

Overview

In this role you will help shape the core infrastructure of Elasticsearch, building scalable, secure and easy-to-use platform features. You will drive developer productivity through automation, APIs, and observability-focused improvements. The role blends low-level systems work with cross-team collaboration to support cloud, serverless, and on-premise Elasticsearch delivery. You will work on impactful, open collaborations and lead cross-team initiatives that advance the platform and its ecosystem.

Pay / Benefits

• competitive pay
• health coverage for you and family
• flexible locations and schedules
• generous vacation days
• donations matching up to 2000
• volunteer time allowance

Responsibilities

• Contribute to large, scalable core infrastructure projects for Elasticsearch
• Identify automation opportunities and integrate agentic apps into development workflows
• Design and implement new horizontally-scalable features and APIs
• Address performance and concurrency challenges with concrete solutions
• Improve operation and observability of cloud Elasticsearch systems
• Collaborate with the ES team, Elastic users, and open source projects
• Support engineers with difficult problems
• Own end-to-end operational investigations until issues are resolved

Key requirements

• API design experience and ability to reason through tradeoffs
• Strong knowledge of algorithms and data structures
• Proficiency in core Java, with concurrency and data structures experience
• Low-level Java experience (concurrency, parallelism, classloaders)
• Hands-on CI/CD experience (Buildkite, Argo CD, GitOps)
• Experience leading large-scale projects across engineering teams
• Proven track record of using AI to accelerate development and debugging
• Ability to work across functions and manage multiple projects

• collaboration
• communication
• autonomy
• Java (core, concurrency, language features)
• data structures and algorithms
• CI/CD systems (Buildkite, Argo CD, GitOps)

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