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ElasticSenior Java Engineer - Core / Infra - Elasticsearch
This full-time, on-site senior Java engineering job in the United Kingdom sits within the Elasticsearch core infrastructure team at Elastic, a company selling search, security and…
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About This Role
This full-time, on-site senior Java engineering job in the United Kingdom sits within the Elasticsearch core infrastructure team at Elastic, a company selling search, security and observability products. The group maintains the shared foundations of the engine, covering services, settings, scripting, the plugin framework and the Painless scripting language. It also handles logging and telemetry, orchestration of Elasticsearch in serverless deployments, and the build and release pipelines that carry the…
Job Description
This full-time, on-site senior Java engineering job in the United Kingdom sits within the Elasticsearch core infrastructure team at Elastic, a company selling search, security and observability products. The group maintains the shared foundations of the engine, covering services, settings, scripting, the plugin framework and the Painless scripting language. It also handles logging and telemetry, orchestration of Elasticsearch in serverless deployments, and the build and release pipelines that carry the product to serverless, cloud and self-managed customers.
Engineers act as strong individual contributors and also help plan and lead projects involving several teams. The posting asks for someone who can reason about low-level behaviour and still communicate complex ideas to a wide range of stakeholders. Day to day, the work includes building new scalable features and interfaces, resolving performance and concurrency problems, and raising the reliability and visibility of Elasticsearch cloud systems.
The team collaborates publicly with the Elasticsearch group, customers and open source contributors, and supports engineers who take on the most difficult cases. Each engineer is expected to own operational investigations from start to finish. The listing says compensation is base salary only, with no variable element, and gives a typical starting base range of EUR 55,800 to EUR 88,300. The job suits an experienced Java developer who enjoys building platform capabilities and works well in a distributed team.
Responsibilities
- Take part in major projects that strengthen Elasticsearch's core infrastructure
- Find and build automation that helps developers ship faster, including links to agent-based development tools
- Design and deliver new scalable features and interfaces
- Investigate and resolve complex performance and concurrency issues
- Raise the operational visibility of Elasticsearch cloud systems
- Collaborate in public with the Elasticsearch group, users and open source projects
- Help support engineers with the most challenging problems
- Stay with operational investigations until the underlying issue is closed
Requirements
- Ability to design interfaces and reason through trade-offs
- Strong grounding in algorithms and data structures
- Advanced core Java, including its collections library, concurrency tools and recent language features
- Hands-on familiarity with lower-level Java topics such as threading, parallelism and class loading
- Practical experience with CI/CD tooling such as Buildkite and Argo CD, plus GitOps methods
- Experience steering large efforts across several engineering groups
- Capacity to take projects from technical design to delivery while working independently
- Proven use of AI tools to speed development and debugging, with accountability for the outcomes
Qualifications
- Understanding of JDK internals, including modules, the memory model, garbage collection and caching
- Experience with observability and telemetry tooling, OpenTelemetry in particular
- Working knowledge of Go
- Working knowledge of containers and Kubernetes
- Experience with Gradle or Maven, with Gradle preferred
- Prior work on a platform team or in developer productivity
Core Skills
Benefits
- Pay based on the work performed, aiming to be fair and competitive
- Health coverage for employees and families in many locations
- Room to shape one's own calendar and location for many roles
- Generous annual vacation days
- Matching of up to $2000 (or local equivalent) for donations and service
- Up to 40 hours a year for volunteer projects
- At least 16 weeks of parental leave
Frequently Asked Questions
Answers are based only on the employer’s listing; where it doesn’t say, neither do we.
Where is the job located and is it on-site?
The listing is for the United Kingdom and is marked as on-site. The posting does not mention remote working.
What is the typical starting pay?
The posting gives a typical starting base range of EUR 55,800 to EUR 88,300. It says there is no variable compensation component.
What type of employment is it?
The role is full-time.
Which core skills are needed?
Strong core Java, API design, low-level concurrency knowledge and hands-on CI/CD experience are required. JDK internals, OpenTelemetry and Go are listed as useful extras.
How do I apply?
The posting does not explain how to apply. It only gives an accommodation request email for candidates during recruiting.
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