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Senior Software Engineer - Vector Search - Elasticsearch

Elastic· Platform - Elasticsearch
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Hybrid (Spain)€67k - €106kfull-timePosted 1mo ago

About the role

Senior Software Engineer to join the Elasticsearch - Search Relevance team, focused on delivering a robust and feature-rich search experience and contributing to improvements in Lucene. Distributed team with emphasis on fast, scalable, and intuitive software and autonomous, collaborative work across continents.

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 designing new algorithms or data structures and working close to the operating system and hardware.
  • Work with a globally distributed team focused on the vector search capabilities of Elasticsearch.
  • Be an expert on Elasticsearch search relevance and drive improvements based on questions and instincts.
  • Work with community members on issues and pull requests, triaging or handling them as needed.
  • Write idiomatic modern Java (Elasticsearch is 99.8% Java).

Qualifications

  • Implemented novel techniques in vector similarity on a search platform with a large user base or contributed to academic research in vector similarity information retrieval.
  • Professional experience with search or vector databases using HNSW, IVF, or other relevant algorithms and libraries at scale.
  • Solid core Java skills, familiarity with the standard library, data structures, concurrency, and features like lambdas.
  • Autonomous with end-to-end project ownership including technical design and cross-team collaboration.
  • Experience collaborating effectively in asynchronous, international environments.
  • Experience with multiple data storage technologies like Elasticsearch, Solr, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, or Cassandra.
  • Proven track record of using AI to accelerate development, debugging, and optimization while owning outcomes.
  • Ability to collaborate across functions and transition between projects, codebases, or teams based on priorities.
  • Autonomous work style with ability to drive decisions and results in a distributed team via asynchronous, direct, and transparent communication.

Skills

Required:JavaVector search / vector similaritySearch platforms / databasesCollaboration (distributed teams, asynchronous)
Nice to have:C/C++ interoperability or low-level familiarityOpen source / community contribution

Benefits

  • Competitive pay with base salary (no variable compensation).
  • Health coverage for you and your family in many locations.
  • Flexible scheduling and locations for many roles.
  • Generous vacation days.
  • Matching donations up to $2000 (or local currency equivalent).
  • Up to 40 hours per year for volunteer projects.
  • Parental leave minimum of 16 weeks.
Last updated Sep 3, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
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