Senior Software Engineer
Job description
About the role
You own the search relevance pipeline from intake to shipped observability. You design, prototype, and iterate on ranking behavior with cross-functional partners. Your work scales across cloud deployments while keeping privacy and compliance intact. You are a technical leader responsible for contributing to the technical direction and vision for search capabilities, including the design and implementation of new search features, enhancements to search functionality, and resolving bugs. You translate ambiguous product goals into concrete search experiments that validate quality and user satisfaction. You act as a domain expert for stakeholders, translating complex search concepts into clear narratives and rationale. You mentor engineers on best practices for search architecture and sustainable development. You ensure that every change to the search stack is traceable, explainable, and aligned with business outcomes.
Key facts
What you'll do
- Architect intake workflows that normalize queries and signals for relevance tuning across diverse data sources.
- Craft ranking experiments and instrumentation to measure precision, recall, and business metrics across varied data sets.
- Guide review cycles with data driven evidence and structured collaboration to refine search quality iteratively.
- Coordinate shipping plans with product, SRE, and analytics teams to enable controlled, low risk rollouts.
- Forge partnerships with external search communities to advance open source Lucene and related projects.
- Champion observability practices that surface latency, errors, and user impact in near real time.
- Model tradeoffs between freshness, accuracy, and performance under different load profiles and constraints.
- Steer incident response when search quality degrades in production, driving root cause analysis and remediation.
- Evaluate emerging techniques in semantic search and retrieval augmented generation within the existing Elastic stack.
- Optimize index structures and query paths to meet stringent service level objectives for availability and throughput.
- Translate ambiguous product requirements into concrete acceptance criteria for search relevance outcomes.
- Conduct post deployment analysis to correlate changes in ranking with downstream user behavior and system health.
- Maintain and evolve the canonical search testing harness to ensure robust validation of new features.
- Document architectural decisions, tradeoffs, and operational runbooks to support long term maintainability.
Requirements
You must have hands on experience with search architecture and distributed systems in production environments. You need fluency in query languages, relevance concepts, and performance profiling across large scale data sets. You are expected to write clear documentation and communicate design decisions to both technical and non technical audiences. You understand constraints around scaling, fault tolerance, and data protection in multi tenant scenarios. You must be comfortable working with version control, code review, and continuous integration pipelines as standard practice. You should have a strong grasp of latency budgets and how they impact user perceived performance. You are required to collaborate effectively with cross functional teams including product, analytics, and operations. You must adhere to Elastic's security, compliance, and privacy standards in all search related implementations.
Nice to have
Experience contributing to Lucene or related open source search projects is valued and welcomed.
Practical notes
This position is Remote eligible. The listed compensation applies to the role in Canada. Collaboration model
Our company is distributed by intention. We hire the best engineers we can find wherever they are, whoever they are. We collaborate across continents every day over email, GitHub, Zoom, and Slack. At our best, we write fast, scalable and intuitive software. We believe that the best way to do that is to empower individual engineers, code review every change, decide big things by consensus, and strive for incremental improvements.
About the 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.