Senior Engineer, Competitive Benchmarking & Performance

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About This Role

Elastic, the company behind the Search AI Platform utilized by more than half of Fortune 500 businesses, is seeking a Senior Engineer, Competitive Benchmarking & Performance to join the Elasticsearch Performance team. This position centers on leading competitive benchmarking efforts, designing practical workloads, executing reproducible experiments, and analyzing how Elasticsearch measures up against alternative systems. The role involves hands-on software engineering to build benchmark automation, along with technical publishing responsibilities…

Job Description

Responsibilities

• Manage prioritized competitive benchmarking initiatives across search, vector and hybrid retrieval, analytical systems, and observability workloads
• Construct and maintain automated testing harnesses, datasets, query sets, and load profiles that mirror production environments
• Plan objective performance comparisons detailing system versions, configuration parameters, tuning choices, and resource constraints
• Assess latency metrics, processing volume, hardware utilization, and financial cost efficiency
• Utilize and modify benchmarking software such as Elasticsearch Rally, ClickBench, and vector evaluation frameworks
• Examine performance gaps through profiling and controlled testing while working alongside engineering teams to validate fixes
• Review cloud and self-hosted environments, including serverless configurations and scalability limitations
• Collaborate with internal partners to produce public-facing technical reports and reproducible benchmarking artifacts
• Partner with product management and engineering to guide future feature improvements based on performance data

Requirements

• Strong programming abilities in Python or another applicable language to build analysis and automation tools
• Practical background in diagnosing and testing performance within databases, distributed architectures, or search engines
• Core expertise in at least one technical focus area such as vector retrieval, search engines, analytical platforms, or observability tools
• Capability to create realistic datasets, concurrency patterns, and query workflows
• Sound methodology regarding variable control, cache effects, warm-up intervals, and measurement accuracy
• Demonstrated history of constructing reproducible test environments with proper documentation
• Proficient technical writing and communication abilities to present complex data insights
• Collaboration skills to convert empirical findings into engineering improvements

Qualifications

• Background working with Elasticsearch, Lucene, Rally, ClickBench, or vector search benchmarking suites
• Experience evaluating retrieval relevance alongside throughput and latency
• Knowledge of cloud cost metrics, autoscaling behavior, and serverless architectures
• History of open-source contributions, public technical publishing, or documented benchmark research

Core Skills

Benefits

• Base salary compensation ranging from €67.000 to €106.000 EUR
• Health insurance coverage for employees and families in many regions
• Flexible work schedules and location arrangements for applicable roles
• Generous annual vacation days
• Donation matching up to $2000 or local currency equivalent
• Up to 40 hours of paid time off yearly for volunteer activities
• Minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave

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