Elastic
Principal Software Engineer - Search Infra - Elasticsearch
Switzerland +1 · Principal · Full-time · Posted Sep 21, 2026
- Location
- Switzerland
United States - 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
Defines technical direction and builds core Elasticsearch search infrastructure, including indexing, retrieval, query execution, and relevance capabilities.
What you'll do
- Lead and contribute to the evolution of Elasticsearch search and indexing capabilities, researching infrastructure, data structures, and retrieval algorithms.
- Set long-term technical vision and roadmaps in collaboration with partner and product teams; guide projects from design through completion.
- Serve as a domain expert and mentor engineers, improving core search systems through technical guidance and collaboration.
What they ask for
- Experience leading technical projects in search infrastructure and distributed systems, and building and operating sophisticated search platforms.
- Experience mentoring expert engineers and defining long-term technical vision for a core search or retrieval system across teams.
- Hands-on experience with search and indexing technologies such as Elasticsearch, Lucene, or Solr; experience with large-scale data or search systems.
- Strong core Java skills and familiarity with advanced data structures, concurrency constructs, and newer language features such as lambdas.
Nice to have
- Experience with open-source projects and familiarity with source control workflows and continuous integration.
- Experience building with Elasticsearch and knowledge of search and information retrieval theory.
Tools
Elasticsearch, Lucene, Solr, Java
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative