Principal Software Engineer - Search Infra - Elasticsearch

Elastic
Germany, DEOn-site

About the Role

About Elastic

Elastic, the Search AI Company, enables everyone to find the answers they need in real time, using all their data, at scale. 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.

What Is the Role

We're looking for a Principal Software Engineer to join the Elasticsearch - Search Infra team. This globally-distributed team of experienced engineers focuses on delivering a robust and feature-rich search experience, including contributing to improving the search experience in Lucene. This role provides technical vision and direction for Elasticsearch's core search infrastructure, including indexing, retrieval, and relevance, and requires deep expertise in search internals and cross-team collaboration.

What You Will Be Doing

As a full-time Elasticsearch contributor, you will define, lead, and contribute to the evolution of core search and indexing capabilities. You'll research advances in search infrastructure, data structures, and retrieval algorithms. You'll work closely with partners and product teams to understand their needs and help shape the long-term technical vision for search at Elastic, bringing past experience with large-scale search systems to drive an innovative roadmap for Elasticsearch's indexing, query execution, and relevance layers.

What You Will Bring

  • Experience leading technical projects in the search infrastructure and distributed systems space
  • Experience mentoring expert engineers, providing both technical and professional guidance
  • Experience defining a long-term technical vision for a core search or retrieval system
  • Hands-on experience with search and indexing technologies such as Elasticsearch, Lucene, or Solr
  • Strong skills in core Java and familiarity with advanced data structures and concurrency constructs
  • Able to work with a high level of autonomy, tackling projects from concept to completion
  • Excellent verbal and written communication skills

Bonus Points: You've built things with Elasticsearch before; experience working with open source projects and different styles of source control workflow and continuous integration.

Additional Information

Competitive pay, health coverage for you and your family, flexible locations and schedules, generous vacation days, and a minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave.

Job Overview

100% EnglishNo German required
ElasticHiring Company
Sep 19, 2026Date Posted