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Senior Software Engineer - Search Algorithms - Elasticsearch

Elastic· Platform - Elasticsearch
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Hybrid (Portugal)€55.8k - €88.3kfull-timePosted 1mo ago

About the role

Senior Software Engineer to join the Elasticsearch - Search Relevance team, focusing on delivering a robust and feature-rich search experience, contributing to improving search in Lucene, and driving technical direction for search capabilities.

Responsibilities

  • Lead initiatives within Elasticsearch to produce an industry-leading search engine offering, supplying unparalleled speed and relevance in search.
  • Contribute to Elasticsearch full time, building new search features and fixing intriguing bugs, including potentially inventing new algorithms or data structures and working close to OS/hardware.
  • Work with a globally distributed team focused on vector search capabilities of Elasticsearch.
  • Be an expert on Elasticsearch search relevance, identifying and driving improvements in this area based on questions and instincts.
  • Collaborate with community members worldwide on issues and pull requests, triaging or handling them as needed.
  • Write idiomatic modern Java (Elasticsearch is 99.8% Java).

Qualifications

  • Professional experience with search or vector databases, with experience using HNSW, IVF, or other relevant algorithms and libraries at scale.
  • Solid skills in core Java, familiarity with data structures, concurrency constructs, and features like lambdas.
  • Autonomy to own projects from design to delivery, including coordinating with other engineers to develop components.
  • Experience collaborating across teams and with asynchronous, distributed collaboration; strong communication skills.
  • Experience with data storage technologies such as Elasticsearch, Solr, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, or Cassandra, with understanding of their workings.
  • Proven track record of using AI to accelerate development, debugging complex systems, and optimizing code while owning outcomes.
  • Ability to work across functions and seamlessly transition between projects, codebases, or teams based on priorities.
  • Ability to drive decisions and results in a distributed team via asynchronous, direct, and transparent communication.

Skills

Required:Search relevanceJava

Benefits

  • Competitive pay
  • Health coverage for you and your family in many locations
  • Flexible location and schedules for many roles
  • Generous vacation days
  • Company matches up to $2000 for financial donations and service
  • Up to 40 hours per year for volunteer projects
  • Minimum of 16 weeks parental leave
Last updated Sep 3, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
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