Elastic
Senior Engineer, Competitive Benchmarking & Performance
$133K–$253K
United States +1 · Senior · Full-time · Posted Oct 21, 2026
- Location
- United States
Canada - 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
Leads hands-on competitive performance benchmarking of Elasticsearch against alternative systems, producing evidence and recommendations that guide product improvements and technical reports.
What you'll do
- Build and maintain reproducible benchmark workloads, datasets, and automation for search, retrieval, analytics, and observability.
- Analyze performance, resource use, and cost through controlled experiments; collaborate with engineering teams to investigate causes and validate improvements.
- Publish benchmark artifacts and reports with engineering and technical content partners.
What they ask for
- Software engineering experience building maintainable automation and analysis tools in Python or another relevant programming language.
- Hands-on experience evaluating and diagnosing performance in distributed systems, databases, or search infrastructure.
- Experience designing representative datasets and workloads and building reproducible test environments.
- Strong experimental judgment, technical writing, communication, and collaboration skills.
Nice to have
- Experience with Elasticsearch, Lucene, Rally, ClickBench, or vector search benchmark frameworks.
- Experience measuring retrieval quality or analyzing cloud performance and cost, including autoscaling and serverless systems; public technical writing, open-source contributions, or published benchmark studies.
Pay
$133,100 — $210,600 USD (base salary); $159,900 — $252,900 USD (base salary)
Tools
Python, Elasticsearch, Lucene, Rally, ClickBench
AI focus
Benchmarks search, vector and hybrid retrieval workloads, including AI retrieval (RAG); measures retrieval performance at comparable recall or relevance targets.
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