Platform - Distinguished Software Engineer I - Elastic

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

Elastics Platform team is responsible for Elastics core "Stack" across Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash. With its scalable and flexible platform, Elastic supports hybrid, public, private, and multi-cloud deployments, making it a trusted partner for over 20,000 customers worldwide. In addition to its core use case of enabling developers to build search functionally into their applications, the Elastic platform powers a complete observability solution (including logs, metrics, trace, profiling, and more), a complete security analytics platform (including SIEM, EDR, and cloud security), and a generative AI development stack (including a vector database, inference services, retrieval services, and more).

We are looking for an experienced technology leader to join the Platform team to help us evolve our core Elasticsearch and ES|QL technologies. These are foundational to the flexibility, performance, and scale of Elastics platform usage in service of our solutions. If you are a deeply technical, hands-on technical leader; focused on database, data language, or data store problems; and with experience leading a breadth of customer facing efforts in large, complex environments, we want to hear from you!

What You Will Be Doing

• Responsible for technical vision and architecture for new initiatives spanning Elasticsearch and ES|QL.

• Leading the delivery of the cross company technical features in partnership with the solution teams.

• Delivering operational SLOs, improving processes, maintainability, testability, re-use, and reliability.

• Collaborating actively with other senior technical leaders to align roadmaps, making appropriate technology choices and trade offs.

• Reviewing and approving implementation designs for core platform features.

• Supporting the contributor community, building engagement, providing best practices and ensuring alignment with architecture.

• Mentoring a dedicated and talented team of Senior and Principal Engineers.

• Being a credible and trusted leader, advocate and influencer for Elastics DE community.

What You Bring

• Deep acumen building scalable data stores (database, data lake) and how to build access layers on top of that.

• Deep acumen building and operating large scale distributed systems and experience dealing with the scale, reliability, security and performance that arise.

• Experience in a technical leadership role for a large and distributed team e.g. large projects, with more than 50 engineers.

• Experience as a hands-on innovation leader, having delivered successful architecture development and/or evolutions.

• A pragmatic approach, experience balancing the needs of multiple stakeholders.

• Experience in language design or compilers for set-based or pipe based declarative programming languages.

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, a great teammate with strong analytical and problem solving skills.

Bonus Points

• Experience using the Elastic Stack and Kibana.

• Experience with a statically typed language (e.g. Go, Java, etc).

• Experience running or significantly contributing to an open source project.

• Experience in Security, Observability or Search domains.