Software Engineering Manager - Elasticsearch

About Elastic, The Search AI Company

The Elasticsearch team is in charge of building the core platform that powers search for Elastic’s customers and users for e-commerce, observability, SIEM, and more. This globally distributed team of experienced engineers focuses on building search functionality in our new piped query language ES|QL, building the most performant metrics and logs solutions, advancing Lucene and Elasticsearch search relevance techniques to build the best vector database, and other relevance-focused search enhancements—such as highlighting, language analyzers, and more.

The Role

This is an experienced Team Lead role where you will be working with the team that delivers the latest innovations in logs and metrics management. You will participate in roadmap and project planning efforts and will have ownership for delivering it, working closely with the Tech Lead and Product Manager. 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. We care deeply about giving you full ownership of what you're working on. Our company fundamentally believes great minds achieve greatness when they are set free and are surrounded and challenged by their peers, which is clearly visible throughout our organization. At Elastic, hierarchy does not determine how decisions get made. We feel that anyone needs to be in the position to comment on anything, regardless of their role within the company. At Elastic, you own your impact. We believe greatness happens when experts are free to collaborate without hierarchical constraints. By removing the barriers, we ensure your voice directly shapes our decisions and the future of our products.

What You Will Be Doing

• Manage, mentor, and lead a globally distributed team of Java engineers working on our logs and metrics solutions.
• Lead the efficient delivery of search enhancements with regular releases of Elasticsearch, ensuring high quality and innovative feature development.
• Work with our Product Managers to define requirements.
• Foster a culture of mutual respect, collaboration, and consensus-based decision-making.
• Stay true to the principles of software development as adopted by our team.
• Build roadmaps and lead prioritization; balance the right amount of structure and planning for a fast-paced engineering team.
• Identify resource requirements and help drive recruitment of high-quality colleagues.
• Support the development and training of direct reports through regular 1:1s and career conversations.
• Be a great person to work with, somebody who sincerely empathizes with others.

What You Bring

• Experience leading distributed teams of Software Engineers.
• Ability to work in a distributed team throughout the world.
• Strong communication skills, both verbal and written, with the ability to drive conversations across multiple teams to a conclusion.
• Previous experience working with stakeholders outside of Engineering.
• You know and care about writing performant software and have traced and fixed performance issues yourself.
• Ability to work independently in a fast-paced environment.

Bonus Points

• Significant experience as a hands-on Software Engineer so you understand the core principles of the engineering work that is going on in your team.
• Experience with query languages.
• Open Source experience.
• Prior professional exposure to Elasticsearch.
• Hands-on experience with Docker and Kubernetes.

Key skills/competency

• Software Engineering Management
• Distributed Teams Leadership
• Java Engineering
• Search Relevance
• Performance Optimization
• Product Roadmapping
• Agile Development
• Team Mentorship
• Cross-functional Collaboration
• Elasticsearch Platform