Senior Java Software Engineer (Search Inference, Platform)

• We are on the lookout for a Senior Java Developer to join our Elasticsearch team and drive our work on the Inference API in Elasticsearch
• The Elasticsearch Inference API is the integration layer between Elasticsearch and external machine learning services including Elastic’s own Elastic Inference Service (EIS), third-party providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, Cohere, Google), and self-hosted models. It powers features like semantic search, reranking, and generative AI across Elastic Cloud and in hosted environments
• You’ll maintain and develop the plugin framework and REST API with your work spanning protocol design, streaming, async execution, billing integration, and with a tight collaboration with the wider inference team and the Kibana team
• Build and maintain integrations with internal systems and external inference providers, including schema negotiation, streaming (SSE), and error normalization
• Contribute to the inference plugin’s internal architecture: task settings, chunking strategies, rate limiting, and provider-level configuration
• Review open source contributions to the codebase and work with third party engineers to ensure their contributions meet our technology standards
• Participate in on-call rotation for inference-related incidents
• Write thorough tests: unit tests using ESTestCase, YAML-based REST integration tests, and rolling-upgrade tests

Benefits

• Toast to your health: Fully paid health coverage for you and your family, in many locations.
• Craft your calendar: Flexible location and schedule for most roles.
• Create space for you: Distributed by design workforce, plus generous number of vacation days each year.
• Embrace parenthood: Minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave, plus generous family formation benefits.
• Give back your time: 40 hours each year to use toward volunteering with organizations and causes you’re passionate about.
• Amplify your impact: Double your charitable giving — we match donations up to $1500 USD (or local currency equivalent).

Experience crafting ergonomic APIs and the ability to reason through trade-offsYou can work autonomously, drive decisions and results in a distributed team by leveraging asynchronous, direct, and transparent communicationYou have a proven track record of using AI to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimize code, while still owning the final outcomesExperience with low-level Java such as concurrency, parallelism, classloaders, etc5+ years of production Java experience, with experience contributing to a large, established Java codebase. You know core Java and are conversant in the standard library of data structures and concurrency constructs, as well as newer language featuresYou possess the ability to collaborate across functions and teams and seamlessly transition between different projects, codebases, or teams based on business prioritiesExperience working in a platform team or developer productivity teamKnowledge of Java build tools (Gradle, Maven, etc.), with a strong preference for Gradle experienceExperience with ML systemsContributions to and ownership of open source projectsKnowledge of JDK internals: modules, the Java memory model, garbage collection, database load, caching techniques, etc

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