Consulting Engineer, Search AI

What is The Role:

As a Consulting Engineer, Search AI, you will play a pivotal role in helping our customers realize the value of Elastic’s Solutions. Acting as a trusted technical advisor, you will work with enterprises to design, deliver, and scale architectures that improve application performance, infrastructure visibility, and end-user experience.

You’ll collaborate with Elastic’s Professional Services, Engineering, Product, and Sales teams to accelerate adoption of the Elastic Observability platform, ensuring customers maximize the value of their data while achieving business outcomes. This is a highly impactful role, with opportunities to guide strategy, lead complex implementations, and mentor both customers and teammates.

What You Will Be Doing:

• Translate business and technical requirements into scalable, outcome-driven solutions built on the Elastic Stack.
• Lead end-to-end delivery of customer engagements — from discovery and design through implementation, enablement, and optimization.
• Partner with customers to architect, deploy, and operationalize Elastic solutions that drive measurable value and adoption.
• Provide technical oversight, guidance, and enablement to customers and teammates throughout project lifecycles.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Sales, Product, Engineering, and Support to ensure successful outcomes and continuous improvement.
• Capture and share best practices, lessons learned, and solution patterns across the Elastic Services community.
• Contribute to internal enablement, mentoring, and a culture of continuous learning and collaboration.
• Apply your expertise to optimize queries, tune clusters, and handle high query/indexing throughput at enterprise scale.
• Collaborate with product and engineering teams to identify product improvements, extensions, and defects based on field feedback.
• Operationalize vector search (e.g., kNN, ANN, hybrid embeddings) with Elastic’s vector capabilities and ML models or similar.
• Profile and tune queries for high-QPS environments with sub-second latency targets.

What You Bring:

• 5+ years as a consultant, engineer, or architect with deep expertise in Enterprise Search technologies and concepts, including generative AI.
• Hands-on experience deploying Elastic Search solutions or similar platforms (Solr, Algolia, AWS OpenSearch, Palantir, Unbxd, e-commerce site search engines).
• Strong experience in custom search solution design, query development, relevancy tuning, and NLP use cases.
• Expertise in distributed systems and large-scale application infrastructure.
• Proficiency in at least one programming language; knowledge of open-source machine learning/AI frameworks preferred.
• Knowledge or certification in Kubernetes, Linux, Java, databases, Docker, AWS/Azure/GCP, Kafka, Redis, VMs, Lucene.
• Familiarity with DevOps practices: Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD.
• Ability to manage delivery from proof-of-concept through production rollout, while mentoring client teams for long-term success.
• Familiarity with modern NLP and AI ecosystems (transformers, Hugging Face, vector DBs like Pinecone or Weaviate) as applied to search.
• Strong communication and presentation skills, with experience working directly with customers to gather requirements and deliver solutions.
• Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent experience.
• Comfortable working in highly distributed teams, both remote and on-site when needed.
• May require significant travel to customer sites to support engagements and solution implementations; candidates should be comfortable with varying levels of travel based on business needs.

Bonus Points:

• Elastic Certified Engineer certification.
• Experience at a Big 4 consulting firm.
• Hands-on experience with Ansible, Terraform, JavaScript, ECK/Kubernetes.
• Familiarity with machine learning and AI applied to search solutions.
• Experience contributing to open-source projects or documentation.
• Public speaking experience at conferences, meetups, or enterprise workshops.

Key skills/competency

• Elastic Stack
• Enterprise Search
• Generative AI
• Distributed Systems
• Kubernetes
• NLP
• Vector Search
• Solution Architecture
• Customer Engagement
• Performance Tuning