Senior Software Engineer, Performance Tuning, Elasticsearch

Elastic

Confirmed live yesterday Trusted

Quick summary

Work type
On-site
Location
Salary
$133,100–$210,600 / yr
Posted
24 days ago
Freshness
Confirmed live yesterday

Market check

Salary context

Below market

How this pay compares to similar roles

Similar $189k
This role $172k
$121k most similar roles pay here $247k

This role pays less than 68% of similar roles. Most pay $165,650–$212,700 — the shaded band above. At the midpoint, this role pays about $172k versus about $189k 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.

Most-posted roles

View all roles at Elastic

At a glance

TL;DR · Senior Software Engineer, Performance Tuning, Elasticsearch

As a Senior Software Engineer - Performance Tuning - Elasticsearch, you will join the Elasticsearch Performance team to improve the optimization and predictability of the search engine. You will contribute to core performance engineering initiatives by executing technical designs for architectural and code-level improvements across distributed systems. Your daily work involves profiling system behavior to identify bottlenecks in logging, metrics, vector search, and ES|QL while building AI-assisted optimization harnesses to automate benchmarking and hypothesis testing. The role requires deep expertise in Java internals, JVM memory management, and concurrency models to write high-performance, thread-safe code. You will utilize tools like JMH and Rally to detect regressions and implement hardware-aware optimizations. This position addresses the technical challenge of maintaining performance and scalability for large-scale data stores and search engines within complex, distributed environments.

What does a Software Engineer earn?

Median $197500 from 2196 postings across 133 companies.

See salary data

What you'll do

  • Execute technical designs and plans for architectural and code-level performance improvements.
  • Implement foundational performance models and methodologies for complex, distributed systems.
  • Profile and analyze system behavior to identify bottlenecks in logging, metrics, vector search, and ES|QL.
  • Establish robust performance benchmarks and regression detection for stateful and stateless architectures.
  • Build AI-assisted optimization harnesses to streamline profiling, hypothesis testing, and benchmarking.
  • Provide technical guidance and peer reviews to other engineers to ensure high-quality code.
  • Develop high-performance, thread-safe, and lock-free code using Java and JVM memory management.

What we're looking for

  • You must have deep knowledge of Java internals and JVM memory management.
  • You must be able to write high-performance, thread-safe, and lock-free code for large open-source or enterprise codebases.
  • You must have proven experience profiling and optimizing distributed systems using tools like JMH or Rally.
  • You must have a solid understanding of distributed systems architecture, including partition tolerance and cluster state propagation.
  • You must have a track record of using AI or advanced tooling to automate benchmarking and debug performance issues.
  • Experience integrating high-performance native libraries like C++, Rust, or SIMD-accelerated code into Java applications (preferred).
  • Deep knowledge of modern storage engine performance, index modes, or vector search optimizations (preferred).
  • Experience working on the internals of a large-scale data store or search engine (preferred).

More like this

Similar roles