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Principal Java Engineer - Distributed Systems, Serverless - Elasticsearch

Elastic· Platform - Elasticsearch
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Hybrid (Romania)RON 326.4k - RON 516.4kfull-timePosted 4mo ago

About the role

Principal Software Engineer focused on scale, performance, and resilience of Elasticsearch, especially for the Serverless offering, tackling deep distributed systems challenges across cluster coordination, indexing, and data management.

Responsibilities

  • Leveraging deep distributed systems expertise to design, build, and operate core pieces of the next-generation Serverless Elasticsearch offering, impacting customers worldwide.
  • Improving Elasticsearch components that support concurrent and consistent indexing across multiple machines.
  • Maintaining the cluster coordination system to keep performance high as nodes join/leave and data moves, while preserving safety and liveness.
  • Pushing the limits on the number of shards, nodes, and petabytes that Elasticsearch can handle today.
  • Investigating performance or concurrency issues and proposing solutions.
  • Supporting support engineers with harder problems.
  • Owning operational investigations end-to-end until performance or stability issues are resolved.

Qualifications

  • Deep background in distributed systems and consensus algorithms.
  • Strong skills in core Java and familiarity with standard data structures and concurrency constructs, plus newer language features.
  • Deep technical proficiency in algorithms.
  • Experience building large-scale distributed systems, not using off-the-shelf services.
  • Experience building and debugging complex features with broad multi-machine impact.
  • Ability to own projects from design through delivery and work with others to develop components.
  • Experience managing projects involving multiple engineers.
  • Proven track record of using AI to accelerate development, debugging complex systems, and optimizing code while owning outcomes.
  • Ability to collaborate across functions and seamlessly switch between projects, codebases, or teams based on priorities.
  • Ability to work autonomously, drive decisions, and deliver results in a distributed team using asynchronous, direct, and transparent communication.

Skills

Required:Distributed systemsJavaAlgorithms

Benefits

  • Competitive pay
  • Health coverage for you and your family in many locations
  • Flexible locations and schedules for many roles
  • Generous vacation days
  • Employer matching donations up to $2000 (or local currency equivalent)
  • Up to 40 hours per year for volunteer projects
  • Minimum of 16 weeks parental leave
Last updated Jul 23, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
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