[Remote] Principal Java Engineer - Distributed Systems, Serverless - Elasticsearch

September 15, 2026

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Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Elastic is a search AI company that provides cloud-based solutions for search, security, and observability. The Principal Software Engineer will join the Elasticsearch Distributed Systems team to design, build, and operate core components of the Serverless Elasticsearch offering, focusing on scale, performance, resilience, and distributed systems challenges.

Responsibilities

Leveraging your deep distributed systems expertise to design, build, and operate core pieces of our next-generation Serverless Elasticsearch offering, directly impacting the experience of customers worldwide
Improving Elasticsearch’s components that support concurrent and consistent indexing across multiple machines
Maintaining our cluster coordination system to keep performance high even though nodes come and go from the cluster and data moves around, while maintaining the safety and liveness properties of the system as a whole
Pushing the limits on the number of shards, nodes, and petabytes that Elasticsearch can handle today
Looking into all kinds of issues, including performance or concurrency issues, and proposing solutions
Supporting our support engineers with the harder problems
Owning operational investigations end-to-end, until performance or stability issues are successfully resolved

Skills

You have a deep background in distributed systems and consensus algorithms
You have strong skills in core Java and are conversant in the standard library of data structures and concurrency constructs, as well as newer language features
You have a deep technical proficiency in algorithms
You have experience building large-scale distributed systems, rather than making use of off-the-shelf services
You have experience building and debugging complex features with a broad impact, running on multiple machines
You are able to own projects from beginning to end. This covers both technical design and working with others to develop needed components
You have experience managing projects involving multiple engineers
You have a proven track record of using AI to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimize code, while still owning the final outcomes
You possess the ability to collaborate across functions and teams and seamlessly transition between different projects, codebases, or teams based on business priorities
You can work autonomously, drive decisions and results in a distributed team by leveraging asynchronous, direct, and transparent communication
Data stores
Search, analytics, Lucene
Strong knowledge of the JDK
Asynchronous event-driven network frameworks such as Netty

Benefits

This role is currently eligible to participate in Elastic's stock program.
A company-matched 401k with dollar-for-dollar matching up to 6% of eligible earnings
Health coverage for you and your family in many locations
Ability to craft your calendar with flexible locations and schedules for many roles
Generous number of vacation days each year
We match up to $2000 (or local currency equivalent) for financial donations and service
Up to 40 hours each year to use toward volunteer projects you love
Minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave

Company Overview

Elastic builds software to make data usable in real time and at scale for search, AI, observability, security, and analytics. It was founded in 2012, and is headquartered in Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, NLD, with a workforce of 1001-5000 employees. Its website is

Company H1B Sponsorship

Elastic has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships, with 1 in 2024, 2 in 2022, 1 in 2021. Please note that this does not guarantee sponsorship for this specific role.

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