Elastic
Principal Software Engineer - Search Infra - Elasticsearch
$160K–$304K
United States · Principal · Full-time · Posted Oct 21, 2025
- Visa sponsorship
- An export license may be required as a condition of employment for applicants located in or nationals of the listed sanctioned countries or regions.
About the job
Defines and leads the technical direction and development of Elasticsearch’s core search infrastructure, including indexing, retrieval, query execution, and relevance.
What you'll do
- Lead and contribute to the evolution of core search and indexing capabilities, including research into infrastructure, data structures, and retrieval algorithms.
- Set long-term technical vision and roadmap for search capabilities in collaboration with partner and product teams.
- Serve as an expert across Elasticsearch domains and mentor engineers.
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 search systems or distributed storage engines.
- Strong core Java skills and familiarity with advanced data structures, concurrency constructs, and newer language features like lambdas.
Nice to have
- Experience in search and information retrieval, including its constructs and theory; prior experience building with Elasticsearch.
- Experience with open source projects, source control workflows, and continuous integration.
Pay
$159,800 — $252,800 USD (base salary); $191,900 — $303,500 USD (base salary)
Tools
Elasticsearch, Lucene, Solr, Java
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