Principal Software Engineer II - Distributed Systems - Elasticsearch
Company: Elastic
Location: Location not specified (Remote)
Type: Full-time
Level: head
Remote: Yes
Posted: 2026-02-14
About this role
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:
We are on the lookout for a
Principal Software Engineer II
to join our
Elasticsearch - Distributed Systems team
and focus on how Elasticsearch provides scale, performance, and resilience. This team owns how nodes in an Elasticsearch cluster communicate, and how data are indexed, allocated, and replicated across nodes.
What You Will Be Doing:
- Improving Elasticsearch’s components that support concurrent and consistent indexing across multiple machines.
- Maintaining our cluster coordination system to keep performance high even though nodes come and go from the cluster and data moves around, while maintaining the safety and liveness properties of the system as a whole.
- Pushing the limits on the number of shards, nodes, and petabytes that Elasticsearch can handle today.
- Looking into all kinds of issues, including performance or concurrency issues, and proposing solutions.
- Supporting our support engineers with the harder problems.
What You Bring:
- A strong background in distributed systems and consensus algorithms.
- You have strong skills in core Java and are conversant in the standard library of data structures and concurrency constructs, as well as newer language features.
- You have a deep technical proficiency in algorithms.
- You have shown your ability to understand and work on compl...