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ElasticSenior Java Engineer - Core / Infra - Elasticsearch
This full-time, on-site senior engineering position in the United Kingdom belongs to the core infrastructure group behind Elasticsearch, the search engine developed by Elastic. The group…
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About This Role
This full-time, on-site senior engineering position in the United Kingdom belongs to the core infrastructure group behind Elasticsearch, the search engine developed by Elastic. The group owns the shared platform layer that other parts of the product depend on, including common services, cluster settings, scripting, the plugin mechanism and the Painless scripting language. It also builds the logging and telemetry that make the engine observable, handles orchestration for Elasticsearch in…
Job Description
This full-time, on-site senior engineering position in the United Kingdom belongs to the core infrastructure group behind Elasticsearch, the search engine developed by Elastic. The group owns the shared platform layer that other parts of the product depend on, including common services, cluster settings, scripting, the plugin mechanism and the Painless scripting language. It also builds the logging and telemetry that make the engine observable, handles orchestration for Elasticsearch in serverless environments, and maintains the CI/CD pipelines used to ship the product to serverless, cloud and self-managed customers.
Engineers in this role work as strong individual contributors and also shape and lead projects that cross team boundaries. The work suits someone comfortable close to the low-level internals of the runtime who can still explain technical trade-offs clearly to a varied audience. Typical tasks include designing scalable features and interfaces that grow horizontally, diagnosing performance and concurrency problems, and making Elasticsearch cloud systems easier to run and monitor.
The team works in public with the wider Elasticsearch group, users and open source projects, and helps support engineers when cases become especially hard. Each engineer owns operational investigations from start to finish, staying with an issue until the performance or stability problem is genuinely resolved. The role is a fit for an experienced Java developer who enjoys building the foundations other engineers use to extend the product, and who is comfortable in a distributed team that communicates asynchronously.
Responsibilities
- Work on large initiatives that reshape the foundation beneath Elasticsearch
- Build automation that speeds up Elasticsearch development, including connecting agent-based tools to engineering workflows
- Create new scalable features and interfaces that grow horizontally
- Investigate hard performance and concurrency problems and recommend fixes
- Strengthen how Elasticsearch cloud systems are run and monitored
- Collaborate publicly with the core team, users and open source contributors
- Assist support engineers with the toughest escalations
- Keep operational investigations moving until the root cause is fixed
Requirements
- Ability to design interfaces and weigh competing options
- Solid understanding of algorithms and data structures
- Fluency in core Java, including its collections library, concurrency primitives and recent language additions
- Working knowledge of lower-level Java areas such as threading, parallel execution and class loading
- Practical experience with CI/CD tools such as Buildkite and Argo CD, and with GitOps methods
- History of directing large efforts that involve several engineering groups
- Capacity to carry a project from design through delivery with limited supervision
- Demonstrated use of AI tools to speed up coding and troubleshooting, while taking responsibility for results
Qualifications
- Familiarity with JDK internals such as the module system, memory model, garbage collection and caching strategies
- Experience with telemetry and observability tools, OpenTelemetry in particular
- Knowledge of Go
- Knowledge of containers and Kubernetes
- Experience with Java build tools, with Gradle preferred over Maven
- Background on a platform team or a developer productivity team
Core Skills
Benefits
- Pay tied to the work performed rather than previous salary
- Health coverage for employees and families in many locations
- Flexible locations and working schedules for many roles
- Generous annual vacation allowance
- 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.
Is the job based in the UK and on-site?
The listing is for the United Kingdom and is marked on-site. The posting does not mention remote or hybrid working.
Is the position full-time?
Yes, the listing is for a full-time role.
What is the pay for this role?
This listing does not state a salary range. The posting notes that the role has no variable pay component.
Which technical skills are required?
Core Java, API design, concurrency knowledge and hands-on CI/CD experience with tools such as Buildkite and Argo CD are listed as must-haves.
How do I apply?
The posting does not describe application steps. It only provides an email address for accommodation requests during recruiting.
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