3 months ago
Ireland (city not specified)Staff+
Responsibilities
- Own performance engineering initiatives from architecture through production, focusing on high-impact optimizations
- Lead technical design, planning, and execution for major architectural and code-level performance improvements
- Develop foundational performance models and methodologies for complex distributed systems
- Drive optimization strategies to keep Elasticsearch performant, predictable, and scalable
- 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 Serverless architectures
- Collaborate across the company to embed performance-first practices into new features
- Design and build AI-assisted optimization harnesses for profiling, hypothesis testing, and benchmarking
- Mentor and coach engineers while fostering technical excellence and performance-aware development
Requirements
- Deep knowledge of Java internals, JVM memory management, concurrency models, and high-performance thread-safe or 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
- Understanding of distributed-systems architecture, partition tolerance, cluster-state propagation, and scaling challenges in large-scale data stores
- Proven track record using AI or advanced tooling to accelerate optimization, debug complex performance issues, and automate benchmarking workflows
- Ability to collaborate across functions and teams and work autonomously in a distributed environment
- Experience integrating high-performance native libraries such as C++, Rust, or SIMD-accelerated code is a bonus
- Knowledge of modern storage-engine performance, index modes, or vector-search optimization is a bonus
- Experience defining and managing performance SLAs and success criteria for distributed systems is a bonus
- Experience working on the internals of a large-scale data store or search engine is a bonus
Benefits
- Competitive pay based on the work performed rather than previous salary
- Health coverage for employees and families in many locations
- Flexible locations and schedules for many roles
- Generous vacation days
- Donation matching of up to $2,000 or local-currency equivalent
- Up to 40 hours annually for volunteer projects
- At least 16 weeks of parental leave
- Distributed work environment
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.