Senior Software Engineer - Search Relevance - Elasticsearch in London

We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join the Elasticsearch - Search team. This globally-distributed team of expert engineers focuses on delivering a robust and feature-rich search experience, including contributing to improving the search experience in Lucene. This is a senior software engineering role that focuses on enhancing the vector and keyword search functionality within Elasticsearch, covering the design and implementation of new search features, enhancements to existing search functionality, and resolving bugs.

What You Will Be Doing

• Contribute to Elasticsearch full time, building new search features and fixing intriguing bugs, all while making the code easier to understand.
• Work with a globally distributed team of experienced engineers focused on the search capabilities of Elasticsearch.
• Be an expert on Elasticsearch search relevance. You'll identify and drive improvements in this area based on your questions and instincts.
• Work with community members from all over the world on issues and pull requests, sometimes triaging them and handing them off to other experts and sometimes handling them yourself.
• Write idiomatic modern Java – Elasticsearch is 99.8% Java.

What You Bring

• Professional experience with search and vector databases, and you used HNSW, IVF, or other relevant algorithms and libraries on search platforms at scale.
• You have strong skills in core Java and are conversant in the standard library of data structures and concurrency constructs, as well as other features like lambdas.
• You work with a high level of autonomy, and are able to take on projects and guide them from beginning to end.
• You're comfortable developing collaboratively. Giving and receiving feedback on code and approaches and APIs is hard!
• You've used several data storage technologies like Elasticsearch, Solr, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, or Cassandra and have some idea how they work and why they work that way.
• You have excellent verbal and written communication skills.

Bonus Points

• You've built things with Elasticsearch before.
• You’ve worked on data storage technology.
• You've worked with open source projects and are familiar with different styles of source control workflow and continuous integration.
• You have experience designing, leading and owning cross-functional initiatives.

Additional Information – We Take Care of Our People

• 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.
• Increase your impact – 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 a minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave.

Security & Privacy Responsibilities

Take ownership of protecting the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of organizational data and systems by following applicable privacy and security policies, standards, and procedures. Ensure that all individual contributions follow Elastic’s Secure Software Development Framework (SSDF). Proactively participate in mandatory role‑based training to ensure personal technical execution consistently aligns with the highest standards of data protection, data privacy, and system resilience.

Equal Employment Opportunity

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 perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, disability status, or any other basis protected by federal, state or local law, ordinance or regulation.

Compensation

The typical starting salary range for this role is: $133,100 — $210,600 USD. In select locations (including Seattle WA, Los Angeles CA, the San Francisco Bay Area CA, and the New York City Metro Area), an alternate range may apply as specified below: $159,900 — $252,900 USD.