Elastic
Principal Java Engineer - Distributed Systems, Serverless - Elasticsearch
$160K–$304K
United States +1 · Principal · Full-time · Posted Jun 12, 2026
- Location
- United States
Distributed, Global - Visa sponsorship
- An export license may be required as a condition of employment for applicants located in or nationals of the listed sanctioned countries and regions.
About the job
Designs, builds, and operates Elasticsearch distributed-systems components, with a focus on scale, performance, resilience, and the Serverless offering.
What you'll do
- Develop and improve indexing, cluster coordination, and data-management components across machines.
- Investigate performance, concurrency, and stability issues and own operational resolutions end-to-end.
- Lead projects involving multiple engineers and support engineers with difficult technical problems.
What they ask for
- Deep background in distributed systems and consensus algorithms.
- Strong core Java skills, including data structures and concurrency constructs; deep proficiency in algorithms.
- Experience building large-scale distributed systems and debugging complex features running across multiple machines.
- Experience owning projects end-to-end and managing projects involving multiple engineers.
Nice to have
- Search, analytics, Lucene, or data-store experience.
- Strong JDK knowledge or experience with asynchronous event-driven network frameworks such as Netty.
Pay
$159,800 — $252,800 USD (base salary); $191,900 — $303,500 USD (base salary)
Tools
Java, Elasticsearch, Serverless, JDK, Netty, Lucene
AI focus
Use AI to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimize code while retaining ownership of outcomes.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative