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ElasticSenior Java Engineer - Core/Infra - Elasticsearch
This on-site, full-time UK role is a senior engineering post on the Elasticsearch Core and Infrastructure team. The group builds the shared foundations that make Elasticsearch…
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About This Role
This on-site, full-time UK role is a senior engineering post on the Elasticsearch Core and Infrastructure team. The group builds the shared foundations that make Elasticsearch simple to use, quick, maintainable and safe: common services, configuration settings, scripting, extension points through plugins and the Painless language, plus logging and telemetry. The team also runs Elasticsearch orchestration for serverless offerings, owns the CI/CD pipelines, and equips developers to ship Elasticsearch to…
Job Description
This on-site, full-time UK role is a senior engineering post on the Elasticsearch Core and Infrastructure team. The group builds the shared foundations that make Elasticsearch simple to use, quick, maintainable and safe: common services, configuration settings, scripting, extension points through plugins and the Painless language, plus logging and telemetry.
The team also runs Elasticsearch orchestration for serverless offerings, owns the CI/CD pipelines, and equips developers to ship Elasticsearch to serverless, cloud and self-managed customers. The engineer works as a strong individual contributor while leading initiatives that span several teams, addressing both low-level performance and concurrency issues and higher-level design.
Candidates bring solid core Java, a talent for API design, fluency in algorithms and data structures, and practical CI/CD know-how across Buildkite, Argo CD and GitOps workflows. Experience steering large initiatives and carrying work from design to delivery is important, as is leaning on AI tools to speed up coding while staying responsible for results.
Responsibilities
- Work on large initiatives that reshape the infrastructure underneath Elasticsearch
- Automate tasks that make Elasticsearch developers faster, including agentic tooling in workflows
- Design and deliver horizontally scalable features and APIs
- Find and fix performance and concurrency problems, proposing remedies
- Improve how Elasticsearch cloud environments are run and monitored
- Drive operational investigations until stability or performance issues are closed out
- Help support engineers with the most difficult cases
Requirements
- Skill in API design and in weighing trade-offs
- Strong grasp of algorithms and data structures
- Solid core Java, including concurrency primitives and newer language features
- Familiarity with low-level Java topics such as concurrency, parallelism and classloaders
- Practical CI/CD know-how across tools such as Buildkite, Argo CD and GitOps workflows
- Track record leading large projects across engineering teams
Qualifications
- Understanding of JDK internals, including modules, the memory model and garbage collection
- Experience with OpenTelemetry or similar observability tooling
- Working knowledge of Go, containers and Kubernetes
- Familiarity with Gradle, Maven or other build tools (Gradle preferred)
- Time spent on a platform or developer-productivity team
Core Skills
Benefits
- 401(k) retirement plan where the company matches contributions dollar for dollar, capped at 6% of qualifying pay
- Compensation tied to the scope of the work, not to earlier salary
- Medical cover extending to family members in a number of locations
- Adaptable hours and places of work for many positions
- A generous annual holiday entitlement
- Donation matching of up to $2,000 (or local equivalent) for charitable giving and volunteering
- As many as 40 yearly hours for volunteer work of your choosing
- Minimum 16-week parental leave
Frequently Asked Questions
Answers are based only on the employer’s listing; where it doesn’t say, neither do we.
Is this role remote or on-site?
The posting lists the role as on-site in the United Kingdom.
What salary does the posting state?
The posting gives a typical starting base salary of USD 133,100 to USD 210,600. In select locations the posting gives USD 159,900 to USD 252,900. The role has no variable compensation component.
What does the team own?
The posting says the team owns shared services, settings and scripting, plugin extensibility, logging and telemetry, serverless orchestration, and CI/CD workflows for Elasticsearch.
Is any support or on-call work mentioned?
Yes. The engineer is expected to see operational investigations through to resolution and to help support engineers with the harder cases.
Sample Interview Questions
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