- 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 20 October 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 seeking a Senior Software Engineer to lead competitive benchmarking initiatives within the Elasticsearch Performance team. This hands-on engineering role focuses on building benchmarks and investigating performance. You will connect deep performance analysis with product improvements and public technical work, helping customers make informed technical decisions.
Responsibilities
- Own prioritized competitive benchmarking initiatives across search, vector, and hybrid retrieval, as well as analytical and observability workloads.
- Build and maintain automated benchmark harnesses, datasets, and load profiles that reflect real-world usage.
- Design fair comparisons with documented system versions, configurations, and resource budgets.
- Evaluate latency distributions, throughput, resource consumption, and cost efficiency.
- Adapt and extend workload-appropriate tools such as Elasticsearch Rally, ClickBench, and vector search benchmark frameworks.
- Investigate performance differences using profiling and controlled experiments, collaborating with engineering teams to validate improvements.
- Work with engineering and technical content partners to publish reproducible benchmark artifacts and clear technical reports.
Requirements
- Solid software engineering skills, with experience building maintainable automation and analysis tools in Python or another relevant language.
- Hands-on experience evaluating and diagnosing performance in distributed systems, databases, or search infrastructure.
- Depth in at least one relevant area (search, vector retrieval, analytical databases, or observability systems) and the ability to learn unfamiliar systems.
- Experience designing representative datasets and workloads, including query patterns, concurrency, and ingestion behavior.
- Sound experimental judgment, including repeated measurements, variability analysis, and distinguishing meaningful changes from measurement noise.
- Clear technical writing and communication skills, with the ability to explain complex findings and their limitations.
Pay and benefits
- Competitive pay based on the work you do here and not your previous salary.
- Health coverage for you and your family in many locations.
- Ability to craft your calendar with flexible locations and schedules for many roles.
- Generous number of vacation days each year.
- Match up to $2000 (or local currency equivalent) for financial donations and service.
- Up to 40 hours each year to use toward volunteer projects you love.
- Embracing parenthood with minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave.
Elasticsearch develops and distributes technology and information that is subject to U.S. and other countries’ export controls and licensing requirements for individuals who are located in or are nationals of the following sanctioned countries and regions: Belarus, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, or Russia, including the Ukrainian territories annexed by Russia (The Crimea region of Ukraine, The Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR), The Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR), Kherson or Zaporizhzhia). If you are located in or are a national of one of the listed countries or regions, an export license may be required as a condition of your employment in this role. Please note that national origin and/or nationality do not affect eligibility for employment with Elastic.
How to apply
Apply directly on Elastic’s own careers website. Omadaily never charges job seekers.
