Elastic
Senior Java Engineer - Core / Infra - Elasticsearch

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Elastic, the Search AI Company
Elastic, the Search AI Company, enables everyone to find the answers they need in real time, using all their data, at scale — unleashing the potential of businesses and people. The Elastic Search AI Platform, used by more than 50% of the Fortune 500, brings together the precision of search and the intelligence of AI to enable everyone to accelerate the results that matter. By taking advantage of all structured and unstructured data — securing and protecting private information more effectively — Elastic’s complete, cloud-based solutions for search, security, and observability help organizations deliver on the promise of AI.
What Is the Role
We are on the lookout for a Senior Software Engineer to join our Elasticsearch team and focus on ensuring that the shared platform functionalities of Elasticsearch are easy to use, performant, maintainable, and secure.
The team’s mission is to create foundational infrastructure and shared functionality that enables engineers to develop, extend, and support Elasticsearch. The team owns common functionality such as services, settings, and scripting, and makes Elasticsearch extensible through plugins or the Painless scripting language. The team also makes Elasticsearch observable by providing logging and telemetry information. We also own the orchestration of Elasticsearch in serverless, the CI/CD workflows, and enable Elasticsearch developers to deliver Elasticsearch to customers - serverless, cloud, and on-premise alike.
You will be a strong individual contributor on the team, but you will also contribute to and lead cross-team projects. We need someone who has great design skills, who can work at a low level of abstraction but can equally drive and communicate technical concepts across a variety of collaborators.
What You Will Be Doing
- Contributing to large, impactful projects that evolve the core infrastructure that underpins Elasticsearch.
- Making Elasticsearch developers more productive by identifying and developing opportunities for automation, and integrating agentic apps into development workflows.
- Designing and implementing new horizontally-scalable features and APIs in Elasticsearch.
- Solving difficult issues, including performance or concurrency issues, and proposing solutions.
- Improving operation and observability of Elasticsearch cloud systems.
- Collaborating in the open with the ES team, Elastic users, and other supporting open source projects.
- Supporting our support engineers with the harder problems.
- Owning operational investigations end-to-end, until performance or stability issues are successfully resolved.
Reasons to use Rodeo
I’m in my final year doing Economics and I don’t know whether to apply for grad schemes now or do a masters first. What do you think?
Honest answer — it depends on where you want to end up. A lot of top grad schemes (Big 4, civil service, banking) don’t need a masters. Let’s look at the ones you’d be competitive for now, and we can decide if a masters actually adds anything.
Also worth knowing: most autumn 2026 applications are open now. Timing matters more than you think.
Start with a chat, not a search bar
Grad scheme, placement, apprenticeship? Not sure what you want yet — that's fine. Your agent talks it through with you and turns "I have no idea" into a shortlist.
Graduate Consultant — 2026 Scheme
Why you're a good match
StrongYour economics background and your summer at a regional bank line up with what PwC looks for on the consulting scheme. Applications close in four weeks.
See breakdownIt searches the market for you
Every day your agent scans the market matching roles against what actually matters to you, not just keywords on a CV.
Why you're a good match
You’ve got the grades and the economics background, and your bank internship is exactly the experience this scheme looks for. Apply soon — deadlines close within the month.
Experience fit
Your summer at the bank plus your econometrics coursework map directly to the day-one responsibilities on this scheme — client modelling, market briefings, and deal support.
Only hits
No noise. No "maybe this fits." Just roles with a clear explanation of why they're right — and where to focus when applying.
What You Bring
- Experience crafting APIs and the ability to reason through tradeoffs.
- Proficient in algorithms and data structures.
- 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.
- Experience with low-level Java such as concurrency, parallelism, classloaders, etc.
- Hands-on experience with CI/CD systems and practices (Buildkite, Argo CD, GitOps etc).
- Experience leading large scale projects across engineering teams.
- Willingness to dive into new issues and ask for help when you need it.
- 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 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.
Bonus Points
- Knowledge of JDK internals: modules, the Java memory model, garbage collection, database load, caching techniques, etc.
- Experience with observability and telemetry solutions, particularly OpenTelemetry
- Knowledge of Go
- Knowledge of containers and Kubernetes
- Knowledge of Java build tools (Gradle, Maven, etc), with a strong preference for Gradle experience.
- Experience working in a platform team or developer productivity team
Additional Information - We Take Care of Our People
As a distributed company, diversity drives our identity. Whether you’re looking to launch a new career or grow an existing one, Elastic is the type of company where you can balance great work with great life. Your age is only a number. It doesn’t matter if you’re just out of college or your children are; we need you for what you can do.
We strive to have parity of benefits across regions and while regulations differ from place to place, we believe taking care of our people is the right thing to do.
- Competitive pay based on the work you do here and not your previous salary
- 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
- Increase your impact - 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
- Embracing parenthood with minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave


Get help with your application
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Different people approach problems differently. We need that. Elastic is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to creating an inclusive culture that celebrates different perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, ethnicity, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, disability status, or any other basis protected by federal, state or local law, ordinance or regulation.
We welcome individuals with disabilities and strive to create an accessible and inclusive experience for all individuals. To request an accommodation during the application or the recruiting process, please email candidate_accessibility@elastic.co. We will reply to your request within 24 business hours of submission.
Applicants have rights under Federal Employment Laws, view posters linked below:
- Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) Poster
- Pay Transparency Nondiscrimination Provision Poster
- Employee Polygraph Protection Act (EPPA) Poster
- Know Your Rights (Poster)
Elasticsearch develops and distributes technology and information that is subject to U.S. and other countries’ export controls and licensing requirements for individuals who are located in or are nationals of the following sanctioned countries and regions: Belarus, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, or Russia, including the Ukrainian territories annexed by Russia (The Crimea region of Ukraine, The Donetsk People's Republic (DNR), The Luhansk People's Republic (LNR), Kherson or Zaporizhzhia). If you are located in or are a national of one of the listed countries or regions, an export license may be required as a condition of your employment in this role. Please note that national origin and/or nationality do not affect eligibility for employment with Elastic.
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