- Company: Elastic
- Location: United Kingdom
- Job type: Full-time
- Salary: Competitive pay based on the work you do here and not your previous salary
✅ Visa sponsor check: Elasticsearch Limited (London) is on the UK Home Office register of licensed sponsors for Skilled Worker, Global Business Mobility: Senior or Specialist Worker (A rating), checked 6 November 2026. Being a licensed sponsor doesn’t guarantee sponsorship for this role: confirm it with the employer, and never pay anyone for a Certificate of Sponsorship.
About the role
Elastic is looking for a Principal Software Engineer to join the Elasticsearch Distributed Systems team. You will focus on how Elasticsearch provides scale, performance, and resilience, particularly within the Serverless offering. This role involves tackling deep distributed systems challenges related to node communication, data indexing, allocation, and management across nodes.
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and operate core pieces of the next-generation Serverless Elasticsearch offering.
- Improve components that support concurrent and consistent indexing across multiple machines.
- Maintain the cluster coordination system to ensure high performance and safety as nodes join or leave the cluster.
- Push the limits on the number of shards, nodes, and petabytes Elasticsearch can handle.
- Investigate performance or concurrency issues and propose solutions.
- Support engineers with complex problems and own operational investigations end-to-end.
Requirements
- Deep background in distributed systems and consensus algorithms.
- Strong skills in core Java, including data structures, concurrency constructs, and newer language features.
- Deep technical proficiency in algorithms.
- Experience building large-scale distributed systems rather than relying on off-the-shelf services.
- Experience building and debugging complex features with broad impact running on multiple machines.
- Ability to own projects from beginning to end, including technical design and collaboration.
- Experience managing projects involving multiple engineers.
- Proven track record of using AI to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimize code.
- Ability to collaborate across functions and teams and work autonomously in a distributed environment.
Pay and benefits
- Competitive pay based on the work you do, not previous salary.
- Health coverage for you and your family in many locations.
- Flexible locations and schedules for many roles.
- Generous number of vacation days each year.
- Matching of up to $2000 (or local currency equivalent) for financial donations and service.
- Up to 40 hours each year for volunteer projects.
- Minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave.
How to apply
Apply directly on Elastic’s own careers website. Omadaily never charges job seekers.
