Senior Software Developer - Performance Tuning - Elasticsearch

About Elastic

Elastic, the Search AI Company, enables everyone to find the answers they need in real time, using all their data, at scale — unleashing the potential of businesses and people. The Elastic Search AI Platform, used by more than 50% of the Fortune 500, brings together the precision of search and the intelligence of AI to enable everyone to accelerate the results that matter.

By taking advantage of all structured and unstructured data — securing and protecting private information more effectively — Elastic’s complete, cloud-based solutions for search, security, and observability help organizations deliver on the promise of AI.

What is The Role

Elasticsearch powers search, observability, and AI retrieval (RAG) for the world's largest organizations. We are seeking a Senior Software Developer to join the Elasticsearch Performance team. In this role, you will contribute to performance engineering initiatives through high-quality code and technical analysis.

What You Will Be Doing

• Contributing to core performance engineering initiatives from development to production, focusing on the delivery of impactful optimizations.
• Executing technical designs and plans for architectural and code-level performance improvements.
• Implementing foundational performance models and methodologies for complex, distributed systems.
• Supporting optimization strategies to ensure Elasticsearch remains performant, predictable, and scalable in diverse environments.
• Profiling and analyzing system behavior to identify bottlenecks in logging, metrics, vector search, and ES|QL.
• Ensuring robust performance benchmarks and regression detection for both stateful and stateless (Serverless) architectures.
• Collaborating with peers across the team to apply performance-focused development practices into new features.
• Contributing to automation efforts by building AI-assisted optimization harnesses that streamline profiling, hypothesis testing, and benchmarking.
• Providing technical guidance and peer reviews to other engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence.

What You Bring

• Deep knowledge of Java internals and JVM memory management.
• Proven experience in profiling and optimizing distributed systems.
• Solid comprehension of distributed systems architecture.
• Proven track record of using AI or advanced tooling to accelerate optimization.
• Ability to collaborate effectively within a team environment.
• Ability to work autonomously and drive decisions.

Bonus Points

• Experience integrating high-performance native libraries (e.g., C++, Rust, SIMD-accelerated code) into Java applications.
• Deep knowledge of modern storage engine performance.
• Experience defining and managing Performance SLAs.
• Experience working on the internals of a large-scale data store or search engine.