Opportunity at
ElasticDirector of Software Engineering - Distributed Systems, Serverless - Elasticsearch
This full-time, on-site Director of Software Engineering role leads Elasticsearch's distributed systems organization. That group focuses on how Elasticsearch delivers scale, performance, and resilience, including the…
Career Tools
About This Role
This full-time, on-site Director of Software Engineering role leads Elasticsearch's distributed systems organization. That group focuses on how Elasticsearch delivers scale, performance, and resilience, including the foundations for Elastic's Serverless offering. The posting describes the organization as roughly 40 engineers and managers, spread across continents. The director would define a multi-year engineering plan for the distributed systems behind Elasticsearch and push improvements to speed, scale, dependability, and cost efficiency. The…
Job Description
This full-time, on-site Director of Software Engineering role leads Elasticsearch's distributed systems organization. That group focuses on how Elasticsearch delivers scale, performance, and resilience, including the foundations for Elastic's Serverless offering. The posting describes the organization as roughly 40 engineers and managers, spread across continents.
The director would define a multi-year engineering plan for the distributed systems behind Elasticsearch and push improvements to speed, scale, dependability, and cost efficiency. The role guides the evolution of core architecture, covering how nodes coordinate, how data gets placed, indexing, replication, and recovery. It also includes recruiting, coaching, and overseeing the managers and senior technical leaders below this role, planning staffing, and acting as the go-to for urgent technical and operational problems.
The job includes partnering with product management and other engineering leaders on priorities and reporting strategy and progress to senior executives. The posting seeks a leader with a record of running large engineering organizations, hands-on depth in distributed systems, and experience operating systems at scale. The team works in a distributed way and collaborates through email, GitHub, Zoom, and Slack. Performance management, including promotions and development plans, is part of the role.
Responsibilities
- Shape and deliver a multi-year engineering plan for Elasticsearch's distributed systems that tracks product direction
- Push forward speed, scale, dependability, and cost-efficiency improvements, including Serverless foundations
- Lead the evolution of the core architecture, covering node coordination, data placement, indexing, replication, and recovery
- Give technical oversight on complex programs and help managers resolve architectural trade-offs
- Own engineering outcomes, including organizational planning, staffing, and resource allocation
- Recruit, coach, and grow the people managers and senior technical leaders, and run performance management
- Act as senior escalation point, coordinating with engineering, support, and SRE groups
- Communicate engineering strategy and priorities to senior executives
Requirements
- Proven record of leading large engineering organizations, including managing engineering managers
- Earlier hands-on coding work, grounded in computer science fundamentals and distributed systems depth
- Experience designing, building, or running large-scale distributed systems, ideally in database engines or distributed storage, or in big-data processing
- Familiarity with fault tolerance, replication, consistency, concurrency, recovery, and tuning for speed
- Track record of building engineering organizations, including senior hiring and leadership development
- Strong operational experience with system reliability and production troubleshooting
- Experience working alongside senior engineering and product leaders on strategy and results
- Ability to influence senior stakeholders in complex situations
- Coaching-focused, compassionate leadership and excellent written and verbal communication
Core Skills
Benefits
- Eligibility for Elastic's stock program
- 401(k) employer match, dollar for dollar, capped at 6% of eligible pay
- Pay set by the role itself rather than by past earnings
- Health coverage for employees and families in many locations
- Flexible scheduling options for many roles
- Generous annual vacation allowance
- Match of up to $2,000 for financial donations and service, plus up to 40 volunteer hours per year
- Parental leave of at least 16 weeks
Frequently Asked Questions
Answers are based only on the employer’s listing; where it doesn’t say, neither do we.
Where is this role located?
The listing gives the location as United States and marks the role as on-site. The posting does not name a specific city.
Is this role remote?
The posting lists the role as on-site, although it describes a team that is distributed across continents.
What is the pay for this role?
The posting gives a typical starting base salary of $199,700 to $315,900 USD. In select locations listed in the posting, the typical starting range is $239,800 to $379,300 USD. Compensation is stated as base salary.
What experience does the employer look for?
The posting asks for a proven record of leading large engineering organizations and hands-on experience with distributed systems. It also asks for experience running production reliability work.
Sample Interview Questions
AI-generated questions tailored to this specific role — a preview of the full practice set.