Distinguished Engineer - Search

About Elastic

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:

As a recognized leader in the search space, Elastic’s Search team connects our core technologies, from Elasticsearch, to our GPU-based inference service, to real-world business needs, enabling our customers to build market leading applications and address critical business needs. We build everything from foundational infrastructure that extends Elasticsearch, to user-facing features like Agent Builder that enable customers to create powerful search and Agentic experiences. You’ll be the technical leader shaping the architecture and vision for Elastic’s Search products, ensuring that using Elasticsearch for building applications, Agents, or as a context engineering Platform is easy to get started with and operate, while preserving the flexibility to configure every aspect of search & relevance. We are looking for a technology and engineering leader (Distinguished Engineer level) to help us realize our goals. The team is looking for someone with success using and building search technology that powers critical applications.

What You Will Be Doing:

• Own and evolve the architecture and roadmap for Search, Context Engineering, and Agent Building.
• Define and enhance the end-to-end developer and user experience across use-cases.
• Collaborate with the team owning Elasticsearch and other engineering teams across Elastic to align priorities and make smart technology and design choices.
• Lead technical discussions with partners and customers to ensure our solutions meet real needs.
• Review and advise implementation designs.
• Evangelize the Search roadmap internally and externally.
• Mentor engineers and foster technical excellence.

What You Bring:

• Proven experience as technical leader for large, complex engineering teams and projects.
• Deep expertise in Java/JVM, search technologies, context engineering, experience building complex distributed systems, or understanding of the inner workings of databases/data stores.
• Passion about Search.
• Ability to reason about architecture at both high and detailed levels.
• Hands-on experience: comfortable coding, reviewing PRs, and staying close to the team’s work.
• Excellent communicator, collaborator, and problem solver.
• Operates with high autonomy.

Bonus Points:

• Extensive technical leadership in search.
• Experience with the Elastic Stack.
• Built search products at scale.
• Open-source project leadership or major contributions.

Key skills/competency:

• Search Technologies
• Distributed Systems
• Java/JVM
• Architecture Design
• Technical Leadership
• Elasticsearch
• AI/ML Inference
• Context Engineering
• Agent Building
• Roadmap Development