Principal Software Engineer I – CI/CD – Platform Engineering Productivity

Overview

In this role you will shape and operate the CI/CD and release infrastructure at Elastic, enabling faster and more secure software delivery across teams. You’ll define the technical vision, remove bottlenecks, and establish scalable release gates to protect the supply chain. As a hands-on yet strategy-focused leader, you’ll coach engineers, drive cross-team alignment, and act as Incident Commander during high-severity incidents. This is a chance to impact how Elastic ships at scale in an AI-enabled era and strengthen security and reliability across the platform.

Pay / Benefits

• competitive pay
• health coverage for you and family
• flexible locations and schedules
• generous vacation days
• donations matching up to $2000
• volunteer hours (up to 40/year)`,`parental leave minimum 16 weeks

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the CI/CD roadmap and org-wide adoption
• Identify bottlenecks, friction, or security risks and lead remediation
• Design scalable release gates for supply chain integrity and release readiness
• Lead multi-quarter projects, breaking down architecture and directing distributed teams
• Communicate technical decisions clearly and produce high-quality documentation
• Serve as Incident Commander for high-severity supply chain or release incidents
• Raise engineering standards via code reviews, mentorship, and design reviews
• Stay hands-on when needed, reviewing code and prototyping while leveraging others for execution

Key requirements

• Deep expertise in CI/CD and release pipeline hardening against supply chain attacks
• Strong debugging across the full pipeline stack
• Hands-on with CI infrastructure (Buildkite, GitHub Actions, or equivalent), GitOps/ArgoCD, and Kubernetes
• Experience using AI to accelerate work and understanding AI impact on security and scale
• Track record of multi-quarter, cross-org ownership and driving change across teams
• Judgment to push back on plans and secure alignment on better approaches
• Experience directing engineers toward outcomes and breaking down complex problems

• proactive mindset
• strong communication and technical writing
• mentorship and leadership
• CI/CD pipelines
• supply chain security
• Buildkite

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