About the company
Elastic, the Search AI Company, enables everyone to find the answers they need in real time, using all their data, at scale. The Elastic Search AI Platform is used by more than 50% of the Fortune 500.
Responsibilities
- Owning core performance engineering initiatives from architecture to production, focusing on high-impact optimizations
- Leading the technical design, plan, and execution for major architectural and code-level performance improvements
- Developing foundational performance models and methodologies for complex, distributed systems
- Driving optimization strategies to ensure Elasticsearch remains performant, predictable, and scalable
- Profiling and analyzing system behavior to identify bottlenecks in logging, metrics, vector search, and ES|QL
- Ensuring robust performance benchmarks and regression detection for stateful and stateless (Serverless) architectures
- Collaborating across the company to embed performance-first thinking into new features
- Driving automation efforts by designing and building AI-assisted optimization harnesses
- Mentoring and coaching other engineers
Requirements
- Deep knowledge of Java internals and JVM memory management
- Understanding of concurrency models; ability to write high-performance, thread-safe, lock-free code
- Experience with large open-source and enterprise codebases
- Proven experience profiling and optimizing distributed systems
- Deep experience with benchmarking tools (flamegraphs, JMH, Rally)
- Solid comprehension of distributed systems architecture, including partition tolerance, cluster state propagation, and scaling challenges
- Track record of using AI or advanced tooling to accelerate optimization and automate benchmarking workflows
- Ability to collaborate across functions and teams
- Ability to work autonomously in a distributed team
Conditions
- Base salary only, no variable compensation component
- Typical starting salary range: $159,800 – $252,800 USD
- In select locations (Seattle WA, Los Angeles CA, San Francisco Bay Area CA, New York City Metro Area): $191,900 – $303,500 USD
- Eligible to participate in Elastic's stock program
- Company-matched 401k up to 6% of eligible earnings
- Range of other benefits with a holistic emphasis on employee well-being