Observability - Distinguished Software Engineer II at Elastic

Elastic is a free and open search company that powers enterprise search, observability, and security solutions built on one technology stack that can be deployed anywhere. From finding documents to monitoring infrastructure to hunting for threats, Elastic makes data usable in real-time and at scale. Thousands of organizations worldwide, including Barclays, Cisco, eBay, Fairfax, ING, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, The Mayo Clinic, NASA, The New York Times, Wikipedia, and Verizon, use Elastic to power mission-critical systems. Founded in 2012, Elastic is a distributed company with Elasticians around the globe. 

At Elastic, we have a simple goal: to solve the worlds data problems with products that delight and inspire. As the company behind the popular open source projects — Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash, and Beats — we help people around the world do great things with their data. From stock quotes to Twitter streams, Apache logs to WordPress blogs, our products are extending whats possible with data, delivering on the promise that good things come from connecting the dots. Diversity drives our vibe. We unite employees across 30+ countries into one coherent team, while the broader community spans across over 100 countries.

The Observability team is in charge of developing solutions that focus on application developers and engineers that run infrastructure and services supporting these applications. Elasticsearch is an efficient datastore for logs, metrics, and application traces, supporting the three pillars of observability. The Observability team builds and maintains solutions that make getting insights from this data turnkey and efficient, such as our APM, Infrastructure Monitoring, Logs, and Uptime solutions. When developing these solutions, we think about the problem end-to-end: how do we automatically collect data from common data sources, how do we store it efficiently in Elasticsearch, how do we present this information to the user, what actions do we take on the insights from the data? All of these aspects are important in bringing a turnkey solution to the market. 

About The Role

In this role you will be key to shape the technical aspect of the Elastic’s observability solution. You will work hand in hand with the Observability solution and Platform leadership to define our technical strategy. As the most senior technology and engineering leader in the observability team (distinguished engineer level) you will help us achieve our ambitious goals in collaboration with the rest of engineering. We are looking for an individual contributor who has experience building Observability products either for Logs, Metrics or APM who can help us evolve our Observability platform. If you have made critical decisions in the evolution of a big product and platform over multiple years and releases, and you can lead a large team with a coherent vision while making appropriate compromises along the way, we want to hear from you! 

Some of the things youll work on

• Leading the efforts to evolve the architecture of the Elastic Observability solution and the roadmap to implement it. Providing a point of escalation for teams facing extremely complex technical challenges.

• Understanding and describing the whole arc of the user experience for each of the Observability solution use cases, and developing features that fit into that arc.

• Collaborating actively with the other technical leads from our Solutions and Platform teams to align priorities and roadmaps, with other leads driving Elastic’s OpenTelemetry contributions, and making appropriate technology choices and compromises

• Leading technical discussions and requirements analysis with partners and customers to drive alignment with customer needs

• Reviewing and approving implementation designs for Observability

• Communicating and evangelizing the Observability roadmap internally and with the community

• Representing Elastic at conferences and networking events where you will highlight the work of the Elastic and Observability teams

• Participating in recruiting efforts : interviewing and hiring tech leads for the team

• Mentoring tech leads

Requirements

• You have extensive experience in a technical leadership role with at least one of the pillars of observability: Logs, Metrics, APM, Synthetic Monitoring or Profiling. 

• You have worked as an architect or technical lead on large projects involving 100 engineers or more and spanning over multiple years and releases

• You work with a high level of autonomy

• Experience using or managing the Elastic Stack 

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, a great teammate with strong analytical, problem solving, debugging and troubleshooting skills.  Written skills are key to success in working with our distributed teams.

Nice to have

• Record of successfully inheriting existing medium-to-large scale projects

• Experience developing APM and Logging products at scale

• Experience running or significantly contributing to an open source project. Contributions to any of these are welcome: OpenTelemetry, OpenCensus, Prometheus, OpenTracing, CNCF, etc

Compensation for this role is in the form of base salary.  This role does not have a variable compensation component.  

The typical starting salary range for new hires in this role is listed below.  In select locations (including Seattle WA, Los Angeles CA, the San Francisco Bay Area CA, and the New York City Metro Area), an alternate range may apply as specified below. 

These ranges represent the lowest to highest salary we reasonably and in good faith believe we would pay for this role at the time of this posting.  We may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range, and the ranges may be modified in the future.  

An employees position within the salary range will be based on several factors including, but not limited to, relevant education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, geographic location, performance, and business or organizational needs.

Elastic believes that employees should have the opportunity to share in the value that we create together for our shareholders. Therefore, in addition to cash compensation, this role is currently eligible to participate in Elastics stock program.  Our total rewards package also includes a company-matched 401k with dollar-for-dollar matching up to 6% of eligible earnings, along with a range of other benefits offered with a holistic emphasis on employee well-being.

The typical starting salary range for this role is:

$297,200—$470,100 USD

The typical starting salary range for this role in the select locations listed above is:

$356,800—$564,400 USD

Additional Information - We Take Care of Our People

As a distributed company, diversity drives our identity. Whether you’re looking to launch a new career or grow an existing one, Elastic is the type of company where you can balance great work with great life. Your age is only a number. It doesn’t matter if you’re just out of college or your children are; we need you for what you can do.

We strive to have parity of benefits across regions and while regulations differ from place to place, we believe taking care of our people is the right thing to do.

• Competitive pay based on the work you do here and not your previous salary

• Health coverage for you and your family in many locations

• Ability to craft your calendar with flexible locations and schedules for many roles

• Generous number of vacation days each year

• Increase your impact - We match up to $2000 (or local currency equivalent) for financial donations and service

• Up to 40 hours each year to use toward volunteer projects you love

• Embracing parenthood with minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave