Principal Software Engineer (Search Scaling, Elasticsearch) 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. By taking advantage of all structured and unstructured data — securing and protecting private information more effectively — Elastic’s complete, cloud-based solutions for search, security, and observability help organizations deliver on the promise of AI.

What is The Role:

We're looking for a Principal Software Engineer to join the Elasticsearch - Search Scaling team. This globally-distributed team of experienced engineers focuses on delivering a robust and feature-rich search experience, including contributing to improving the search experience in Lucene. This is a principal software engineering role that entails using your vast knowledge in this space in order to define, direct, and build the next generation of Elasticsearch capabilities. This role provides technical vision and direction for Elasticsearch’s core search infrastructure, including indexing, retrieval, and relevance, and requires deep expertise in search internals and cross-team collaboration.

Our company is distributed by intention. We hire the best engineers we can find wherever they are, whoever they are. We collaborate across continents every day over email, GitHub, Zoom, and Slack. At our best, we write fast, scalable and intuitive software. We believe that the best way to do that is to empower individual engineers, code review every change, decide big things by consensus, and strive for incremental improvements.

What You Will Be Doing:

• As a full-time Elasticsearch contributor, you will define, lead, and contribute to the evolution of core search and indexing capabilities.
• You’ll research advances in search infrastructure, data structures, and retrieval algorithms to ensure we’re building the most efficient and powerful foundations for our users.
• You’ll work closely with our partners and product teams to understand their needs and help shape the long‑term technical vision for search at Elastic.
• You’ll bring your past experience with large‑scale search systems to drive an innovative roadmap for Elasticsearch’s indexing, query execution, and relevance layers.
• As an authority in several areas of Elasticsearch, you’ll be the go‑to expert for those domains, continuously improving them through your insights and instincts.

What You Bring:

• Experience leading technical projects in the search infrastructure and distributed systems space.
• You bring proven knowledge in building and operating sophisticated search platforms and engineering robust, high‑performance software systems.
• Experience mentoring expert engineers, providing both technical and professional guidance.
• Experience defining a long‑term technical vision for a core search or retrieval system, working across teams and organizations to collaboratively shape the technical roadmap.
• Hands‑on experience with search and indexing technologies such as Elasticsearch, Lucene, or Solr.
• Strong skills in core Java and familiarity with advanced data structures and concurrency constructs, as well as newer language features like lambdas.
• A strong desire to optimize and leverage the most efficient algorithms and search data structures.
• Able to work with a high level of autonomy, tackling projects and guiding them from concept to completion, including both technical design and collaboration with other engineers to develop the necessary components.
• Experience with large‑scale data or search systems such as Elasticsearch, Lucene, Solr, or distributed storage engines, and an understanding of how they work and why they work that way.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills. Collaborating across distributed teams is challenging; we value being supportive, empathetic, and trusting in all interactions, and we expect the same from everyone on the team.

Bonus Points:

• You've built things with Elasticsearch before, and you have experience in the search and information retrieval space and understand the constructs and theory behind it.
• Experience working with open source projects and familiar with different styles of source control workflow and continuous integration.

Additional Information - We Take Care of Our People:

As a distributed company, diversity drives our identity. Whether you’re looking to launch a new career or grow an existing one, Elastic is the type of company where you can balance great work with great life. Your age is only a number. It doesn’t matter if you’re just out of college or your children are; we need you for what you can do.

We strive to have parity of benefits across regions, and while regulations differ from place to place, we believe taking care of our people is the right thing to do.

• 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

Different people approach problems differently. We need that. 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.

We welcome individuals with disabilities and strive to create an accessible and inclusive experience for all individuals. To request an accommodation during the application or the recruiting process, please email. We will reply to your request within 24 business hours of submission.

Applicants have rights under Federal Employment Laws and can view the following posters linked below: Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) Poster, Employee Polygraph Protection Act (EPPA) Poster.

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.

Please see here for our Privacy Statement.

What Elastic Has to Offer:

Elastic is the company behind the Elastic Stack - Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash. From stock quotes to Twitter streams, Apache logs to WordPress blogs, Elastic helps people explore and analyze their data differently using the power of search. Thousands of organizations worldwide, including Cisco, eBay, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, The Mayo Clinic, NASA, The New York Times, Wikipedia, and Verizon, use Elastic to power mission‑critical systems.

Elastic offers their employees benefits like:

• 401(k) / Retirement Plan
• Minimum 16 weeks of parental leave
• Health coverage & vision insurance
• Flexible locations & schedules
• Work from home policy
• Generous vacation time & paid holidays