3 months ago
Base Salary
$160k - $253k/yr
Responsibilities
- Own performance engineering initiatives from architecture through production, including technical design, planning, and execution of major optimizations.
- Develop performance models and methodologies for complex distributed systems.
- Drive optimization strategies to keep Elasticsearch performant, predictable, and scalable across diverse environments.
- Profile and analyze system behavior to identify bottlenecks in logging, metrics, vector search, and ES|QL.
- Build robust performance benchmarks and regression detection for stateful and stateless Serverless architectures.
- Partner across the company to embed performance-first thinking into new features.
- Design and build AI-assisted optimization harnesses for profiling, hypothesis testing, and benchmarking.
- Mentor and coach engineers while promoting technical excellence and performance-aware development.
Requirements
- Deep knowledge of Java internals, JVM memory management, concurrency models, high-performance code, thread safety, and lock-free programming.
- Experience working with large open-source and enterprise codebases.
- Proven experience profiling and optimizing distributed systems using benchmarking tools such as flamegraphs, JMH, and Rally.
- Strong understanding of distributed systems architecture, partition tolerance, cluster state propagation, and large-scale data-store scaling challenges.
- Experience using AI or advanced tooling to accelerate optimization, debug complex performance issues, and automate benchmarking workflows.
- Ability to collaborate across functions and teams, transition between projects and codebases, and work autonomously in a distributed environment.
- Experience integrating high-performance native libraries such as C++ or Rust, or SIMD-accelerated code, into Java applications is a bonus.
- Knowledge of modern storage engine performance, index modes, or vector search optimizations is a bonus.
- Experience defining and managing performance SLAs and success criteria for distributed systems is a bonus.
- Experience with the internals of a large-scale data store or search engine is a bonus.
Benefits
- Base salary with no variable compensation component
- Eligibility to participate in Elastic's stock program
- Company-matched 401(k) with dollar-for-dollar matching up to 6% of eligible earnings
- Health coverage for employees and families in many locations
- Distributed work environment with flexible locations and schedules for many roles
- Generous vacation days
- Up to $2,000 matching for financial donations and service
- Up to 40 hours annually for volunteer projects
- Minimum 16 weeks of parental leave
About Elastic
Elastic builds the Elasticsearch-based platform for enterprise search, observability (logging, metrics, APM), and security (SIEM/endpoint). It sells subscriptions and Elastic Cloud managed services with usage-based pricing, combining open source and proprietary features through Elasticsearch and Kibana. Founded in 2012 and headquartered in San Francisco, Elastic is publicly traded on the NYSE and is used by more than half of the Fortune 500.