3 months ago
Canada (city not specified)Staff+
Responsibilities
- Own core performance engineering initiatives from architecture through production
- Lead technical design, planning, and execution of major architectural and code-level performance improvements
- Develop performance models and methodologies for complex distributed systems
- Drive optimization strategies for performant, predictable, and scalable Elasticsearch deployments
- 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
- Collaborate across the company to incorporate 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, and high-performance thread-safe and lock-free programming
- Experience working with large open-source and enterprise codebases
- Proven experience profiling and optimizing distributed systems
- Deep experience with benchmarking tools such as flamegraphs, JMH, and Rally
- Ability to identify performance regressions and implement algorithmic or hardware-aware optimizations
- Strong understanding of distributed systems architecture, partition tolerance, cluster state propagation, and large-scale data-store scaling
- Track record using AI or advanced tooling to accelerate optimization, debug performance issues, and automate benchmarking workflows
- Experience collaborating across functions and teams, working autonomously, and driving decisions in a distributed environment
- Preferred experience integrating high-performance native libraries such as C++, Rust, and SIMD-accelerated code into Java applications
- Preferred knowledge of modern storage engine performance, index modes, or vector search optimization
- Preferred experience defining and managing performance SLAs and success criteria for distributed systems
- Preferred experience with internals of a large-scale data store or search engine
Benefits
- Distributed company with flexible locations and schedules for many roles
- Health coverage for employees and families in many locations
- Generous vacation days
- Donation matching up to $2,000 or local currency equivalent
- Up to 40 hours annually for volunteer projects
- Minimum 16 weeks of parental leave
- Company-matched RRSP with dollar-for-dollar matching up to 6% of eligible earnings
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.