Principal Software Engineer in London

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.

The Platform Billing team’s mission is to deliver a simple, transparent, and flexible SaaS billing experience that powers Elastic’s Cloud business. Operating at global scale across all three major cloud providers, AWS, GCP, and Azure, Elastic Cloud serves critical workloads in over 50 regions worldwide. Billing sits at the core of Elastic’s business strategy, enabling growth through capabilities such as usage-based metering, consumption billing, and marketplace integrations. We build and operate the systems that manage the entire billing lifecycle — from collecting millions of usage data points across distributed environments, to calculating customer charges and exposing this information through APIs and user interfaces.

Within Platform Billing, the Billing Experience (BEX) team focuses on the customer-facing layer of our billing systems. We own the public and internal APIs, as well as the billing and account experiences within Elastic Cloud consoles. Our goal is to make it easy, accurate, and intuitive for customers and internal partners to understand and manage their billing data.

We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to lead technical direction and execution across the Billing Experience domain. This is a hands‐on technical leadership role that combines system design, operational excellence, and cross‐team collaboration. You will shape how Elastic’s billing services evolve — improving scalability, reliability, and developer productivity across multiple components and teams. You will partner closely with Product, SRE, and Cloud Infrastructure teams to ensure our systems are resilient, observable, and efficient at global scale.

Responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end technical ownership of complex billing and account management systems that span multiple services and cloud providers.
• Design and implement large‐scale data pipelines for billing data ingestion, transformation, and reconciliation, ensuring high performance and accuracy.
• Drive operational excellence: improve observability, incident response, and reliability of core billing components using modern DevOps practices.
• Shape system architecture for elasticity, scalability, and modularity, guiding service decomposition, API design, and data modeling efforts.
• Partner with SRE and Cloud teams to evolve deployment, monitoring, and CI/CD pipelines for critical billing services.
• Own PostgreSQL data architecture and performance tuning, ensuring query efficiency, schema design quality, and high availability.
• Act as the expert reviewer and go‐to person for key parts of the billing experience stack, ensuring technical consistency and high‐quality engineering practices.
• Mentor and influence engineers and tech leads across the Billing organization, helping them elevate design, operational standards, and long‐term technical thinking.
• Collaborate multi‐functionally with Product, Design, and Finance partners to shape roadmap priorities, ensuring technical feasibility and business alignment.
• Participate in on‐call rotations and ensure production readiness through automation, resilience testing, and robust alerting.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience (8+ years) in backend or platform engineering, with strong expertise in Python and PostgreSQL (schema design, performance optimization, HA setups).
• Deep understanding of distributed systems and event‐driven architectures in large‐scale SaaS environments.
• Operational focus with proven experience improving reliability, observability, and incident response in production systems.
• Strong background in cloud‐native infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including networking, IAM, monitoring, and deployment patterns.
• Demonstrated ability to design and lead multi‐quarter projects that span multiple teams or domains, driving consensus and measurable results.
• Proven record of mentoring engineers, setting technical direction, and elevating engineering quality standards.
• Experience with SaaS billing, metering, or financial systems is a strong plus.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills; able to influence across organizational boundaries and present clearly to technical and non‐technical partners.
• Comfortable working autonomously in a globally distributed, asynchronous environment.

Benefits & Additional Information

• 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.
• We 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.

Elastic is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to creating an inclusive culture that celebrates different perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, ethnicity, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, disability status, or any other basis protected by federal, state or local law, ordinance or regulation.