This role pays more than
53%
of similar roles. Most pay
$172,350–$230,625
— the shaded band above.
At the midpoint, this role pays about
$206k
versus about
$201k
for comparable roles.
Based on 240 similar postings.
Employer
About Elastic
Elastic is the company behind Elasticsearch and the Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash). It sells search, observability, and security products built on that search engine, primarily through its Elastic Cloud managed service.
Elastic currently has
240 open roles
on FindRole.
Listed pay typically runs
$133,100–$210,600
across 91 roles with salary data.
Principal Software Engineer - Performance Tuning - Elasticsearch joins the Elasticsearch Performance team to lead architectural and code-level performance engineering initiatives. The successful candidate will own core performance projects from architecture to production, focusing on high-impact optimizations for distributed systems. Key responsibilities include developing performance models, profiling system behavior in areas like vector search and ES|QL, and building AI-assisted optimization harnesses to automate benchmarking and hypothesis testing. This role requires deep expertise in Java internals, JVM memory management, and concurrency models to write thread-safe, lock-free code. Candidates must be proficient with tools such as flamegraphs, JMH, and Rally while demonstrating a strong grasp of distributed systems architecture, including partition tolerance and cluster state propagation. The role addresses the technical challenge of ensuring Elasticsearch remains performant, predictable, and scalable across diverse environments for large-scale data stores.
What does a Software Engineer earn?
Median $197500 from 2196 postings across 133 companies.