Senior Java Engineer - Distributed Systems - Elasticsearch

Elastic, the Search AI Company, is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join their Elasticsearch - Distributed Systems team. This team focuses on ensuring Elasticsearch provides exceptional scale, performance, and resilience, specifically owning how nodes communicate and how data is indexed, allocated, and replicated across clusters. The role involves improving components for concurrent and consistent indexing, maintaining cluster coordination for high performance, and pushing the limits of Elasticsearch's capacity. The company emphasizes a distributed and diverse culture, offering a supportive environment for career growth. They prioritize work-life balance and provide competitive benefits globally. Elastic is an equal opportunity employer committed to inclusivity, welcoming individuals from all backgrounds and experiences.

Requirements

Strong background in distributed systems and consensus algorithms. Strong skills in core Java, including standard library data structures and concurrency constructs, as well as newer language features. Deep technical proficiency in algorithms. Demonstrated ability to understand and work on complex, highly distributed systems. Ability to build and debug features with broad impact across multiple machines. Ability to own projects from beginning to end, including technical design and collaboration. Experience with data stores. Experience with search, analytics, and Lucene. Strong knowledge of the JDK. Experience with asynchronous event-driven network frameworks such as Netty.

Responsibilities

Improving Elasticsearch’s components that support concurrent and consistent indexing across multiple machines. Maintaining the cluster coordination system to keep performance high even as nodes join or leave and data moves, while ensuring system safety and liveness. Pushing the limits on the number of shards, nodes, and petabytes that Elasticsearch can handle. Investigating and proposing solutions for various issues, including performance or concurrency problems. Supporting support engineers with complex technical challenges. Taking ownership of protecting the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of organizational data and systems by following applicable privacy and security policies. Ensuring all individual contributions follow Elastic’s Secure Software Development Framework (SSDF). Proactively participating in mandatory role-based training to align with data protection, privacy, and system resilience standards.
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