Senior Software Engineer

About the role

You will lead the architectural evolution of Elasticsearch core storage engine components, continuously identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks in indexing layouts, serialization formats, and resource utilization. You will spearhead cross organizational initiatives to drive and build industry leading observability solutions for logs and metrics workloads. You will operate as a subject matter expert across key areas of Elasticsearch, acting as a trusted technical advisor and mentor to the wider engineering organization. You will work with a globally distributed team of experienced engineers focused on the logs and metrics capabilities of Elasticsearch. You will drive continuous operational and system improvements by introducing best practices for clean coding standards, demystifying complex system behaviors, and untangling complexity to bring architectural clarity across the platform. You will collaborate with a global community to triage, resolve, and review issues and pull requests, collaborating with domain experts as needed. You will write idiomatic modern Java, as Elasticsearch is predominantly Java based in its core storage and query execution layers.

Key facts

What you'll do

Lead the architectural evolution of core storage engine components, continuously identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks in indexing layouts, serialization formats, and resource utilization.

Lead cross organizational initiatives to drive and build industry leading observability solutions.

Work with a globally distributed team of experienced engineers focused on the logs and metrics capabilities of Elasticsearch.

Drive continuous operational and system improvements by introducing best practices for clean coding standards, demystifying complex system behaviors, untangling complexity to bring architectural clarity across the platform.

Serve as a subject matter expert (SME) across key areas of Elasticsearch, acting as a trusted technical advisor and mentor to the wider engineering organization.

Work with a global community to triage, resolve, and review issues and pull requests, collaborating with domain experts as needed.

Write idiomatic modern Java, leveraging language features to build scalable and maintainable components.

Contribute to design discussions for data layouts, query execution, and storage efficiency in object storage backends.

Analyze and optimize query processing paths to improve latency, throughput, and resource utilization in observability workloads.

Collaborate with product, design, and operations stakeholders to translate requirements into robust technical solutions.

Requirements

You possess the ability to collaborate across functions and teams and seamlessly transition between different projects, codebases, or teams based on business priorities.

You work autonomously and can drive decisions and results in a distributed team by leveraging asynchronous, direct, and transparent communication.

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 bring a prompt engineering mindset to know how to leverage AI agents effectively, using sound engineering judgment to validate results and recognize its limitations.

You have implemented novel techniques to efficiently index, store, and query time series or logs data.

You have experience with one or more data storage technologies such as Elasticsearch, Solr, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, or Prometheus and understand how they work and why they are designed that way.

You have strong core Java skills, a deep understanding of its concurrency primitives, and a proven ability to design and optimize efficient data structures and algorithms.

You excel in a collaborative environment, actively participating in technical discussions and working effectively across distributed teams, because this is the best way to build software.

You have excellent verbal and written communication skills and collaborate with respect, empathy, and professionalism in a distributed team.

You are comfortable working full time in Ireland aligned with business needs, understanding that this may involve overlapping hours for coordination with other global teams.

You have a history of contributing to open source projects or engaging with community driven development practices.

You thrive in an environment that values incremental improvements, code review for every change, and consensus driven decision making.

You are comfortable using command line tools, scripting, and automation to manage development workflows and debugging production issues.

You understand the importance of security and data protection when handling sensitive or private information at scale.

Nice to have

Experience contributing to large scale distributed systems with high availability and strict performance requirements.

Familiarity with search and analytics platforms and their query languages and execution engines.

Experience with performance profiling, benchmarking, and capacity planning for data intensive systems.

Practical notes

This role requires full time availability based in Ireland, with working hours aligned to support global collaboration and operational needs. Travel is not expected as part of this role. Visa sponsorship is not available for this position. The employment terms are defined by local laws and company policies applicable to Irish based roles.