Elastic

Senior Engineer, Competitive Benchmarking & Performance

Elastic
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21 days ago
Spain (city not specified)Senior

Responsibilities

  • Own competitive benchmarking initiatives across search, vector and hybrid retrieval, analytical, and observability workloads.
  • Build and maintain automated benchmark harnesses, datasets, query sets, and realistic load profiles covering concurrent ingestion and querying.
  • Design fair, documented comparisons covering versions, configurations, tuning, resource budgets, and functional differences.
  • Measure latency distributions, throughput, resource consumption, cost efficiency, and retrieval quality at comparable recall or relevance targets.
  • Adapt tools such as Elasticsearch Rally, ClickBench, and vector search benchmark frameworks.
  • Investigate performance differences through profiling, system metrics, and controlled experiments, and validate engineering improvements.
  • Evaluate self-managed and managed cloud deployments, including serverless offerings, scaling behavior, and service constraints.
  • Publish reproducible benchmark artifacts and technical reports with engineering and technical content partners.
  • Partner with engineering and product management to prioritize benchmark coverage and translate findings into product improvements.

Requirements

  • Solid software engineering skills and experience building maintainable automation and analysis tools in Python or another relevant programming language.
  • Hands-on experience evaluating and diagnosing performance in distributed systems, databases, or search infrastructure.
  • Depth in search, vector retrieval, analytical databases, or observability systems, with the ability to learn unfamiliar systems.
  • Experience designing representative datasets and workloads, including query patterns, concurrency, and ingestion behavior.
  • Sound experimental judgment involving repeated measurements, variability analysis, warm-up and cache effects, and measurement-noise assessment.
  • Experience building reproducible test environments and documenting configurations, procedures, and results.
  • Clear technical writing and communication skills for explaining complex findings and limitations.
  • Strong collaboration skills and the ability to turn performance evidence into engineering recommendations.
  • Preferred experience includes Elasticsearch, Lucene, Rally, ClickBench, vector search benchmarking, retrieval-quality measurement, cloud performance and cost analysis, autoscaling, serverless systems, public technical writing, open-source contributions, or published benchmark studies.

Benefits

  • Base salary with no variable compensation component.
  • Health coverage for employees and families in many locations.
  • Distributed-company flexibility with flexible locations and schedules for many roles.
  • Generous vacation days.
  • Elastic matches up to $2000 or local equivalent for financial donations and service.
  • Up to 40 hours annually for volunteer projects.
  • At least 16 weeks of parental leave.

Tech Stack

ElasticsearchPython

Categories

Elastic

About Elastic

10,000+ employees

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.

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