Principal Software Developer - Storage Engine - Elasticsearch
$154,000–$243,600 year
Remote
Job Summary
Lead architectural evolution of core storage engine components, continuously identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks in indexing layouts, serialization formats, and resource utilization. Drive continuous operational and system improvements by introducing best practices for clean coding standards and demystifying complex system behaviors to bring architectural clarity. Serve as a subject matter expert acting as a trusted technical advisor and mentor to the wider engineering organization. Write idiomatic modern Java and work with a global community to triage, resolve, and review issues and pull requests. Lead cross organizational initiatives to build industry-leading observability solutions focused on logs and metrics capabilities.
Required Qualifications
- Proven track record of designing high-performance, scalable database or search engine technologies
- Ability to drive technical initiatives across organizations
- Ability to collaborate across functions and teams and seamlessly transition between different projects, codebases, or teams based on business priorities
- Ability to work autonomously and drive decisions and results in a distributed team by leveraging asynchronous, direct, and transparent communication
- Proven track record of using AI to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimize code, while still owning the final outcomes
- Prompt-engineering mindset to know how to leverage AI agents effectively, using sound engineering judgment to validate results and recognize its limitations
- Implemented novel techniques to efficiently index, store, and query time-series or logs data
- Experience with one or more data storage technologies like Elasticsearch, Solr, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, or Prometheus and have some idea how they work and why they work that way
- Strong core Java skills, a deep understanding of its concurrency primitives, with a proven ability to design and optimize efficient data structures and algorithms
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills
- Ability to collaborate with respect, empathy, and professionalism in a distributed team
- Must be able to write idiomatic modern Java
- Must be able to lead the architectural evolution of core storage engine components
- Must be able to continuously identify and resolve performance bottlenecks in indexing layouts, serialization formats, and resource utilization
- Must be able to lead cross organizational initiatives to drive and build industry-leading observability solutions
- Must be able to work with a globally distributed team of experienced engineers focused on the logs and metrics capabilities of Elasticsearch
- Must be able to drive continuous operational and system improvements by introducing best practices for clean coding standards, demystifying complex system behaviors, untangling complexity to bring architectural clarity across the platform
- Must be able to serve as a subject matter expert (SME) across key areas of Elasticsearch, acting as a trusted technical advisor and mentor to the wider engineering organization
- Must be able to work with a global community to triage, resolve, and review issues and pull requests, collaborating with domain experts as needed
- Must be able to drive technical vision, architecture, and design of Elasticsearch's core storage and query engine
- Must be able to improve storage efficiency
- Must be able to advance ES|QL query processing and performance
- Must be able to optimize data layouts for object storage
Desired Qualifications
- Bonus Points: You've built things with Elasticsearch before
- Bonus Points: You've worked with open source projects and are familiar with different styles of source control workflow and continuous integration
- Bonus Points: You've worked on data storage technology
- Bonus Points: You have experience designing, leading, and owning cross-functional initiatives
- Bonus Points: You have past working experience with database, search engine, OS, or cloud service development
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