← All roles

Principal AI Engineer - Context - Agents and Context

Elastic· Enterprise Search - Engineering
Apply on company site
Hybrid (Spain)€80.4k - €127.2kfull-timePosted 4w ago

About the role

Principal AI Engineer role focused on the Context Engine for AI agents and enterprise data in Elasticsearch. Owns the end-to-end improvement loop for agent behavior, evaluation, telemetry, and safe rollout of changes. Hybrid role balancing engineering, data science, and product with code and public collaboration.

Responsibilities

  • Own the production improvement loop for Context Engine: understand extraction automations, retrieval tools and memory behavior, identify failure modes, fix them, and prove the fix.
  • Define how we iterate on agents and skills safely: versioning and rollout of prompts, skills and automations, regression coverage, staged and shadow evaluation, and guardrails to change behavior without breaking customers.
  • Design the telemetry needed for data-informed engineering decisions: what to capture from agent traces, tool calls and knowledge retrieval, how it lands in Elasticsearch, and how it feeds evaluation, dashboards and feedback loops.
  • Partner with the data science team on evaluation strategy: golden datasets, evaluators to gate on quality, latency and cost.
  • Raise the bar across the team: review designs and PRs, mentor engineers in eval-driven development, and write technical proposals shaping the roadmap.

Qualifications

  • 10+ years of software engineering experience with recent focus on shipping and operating AI-driven products on production traffic, preferably with public APIs and evolving data models.
  • Track record of eval-driven product improvement: diagnose agent/LLM behavior from traces and user feedback, design evaluation, ship fixes, and measure outcomes.
  • Direct experience building agents with state and memory, iterating on prompts, skills and tool behavior in production.
  • Familiarity with MCP, including exposing public MCP servers and tools.
  • Experience designing telemetry for AI systems and using it to inform engineering/product decisions.
  • Experience running product experiments end to end: instrumentation, unattended execution, interpreting results.
  • Experience building products with public APIs and evolving data models, maintaining external contracts.
  • Strong backend engineering skills in Python or TypeScript (APIs, stateful workflows, data pipelines, production services).
  • Ability to collaborate with data scientists, engineers and product managers; clear communication of trade-offs.
  • Pragmatic, low-ego, distributed/async-friendly.”

Skills

Required:Software engineeringAgent-based systemsTelemetry designBackend development (Python/TypeScript)
Nice to have:MCP exposure

Benefits

  • Competitive pay with transparent remuneration
  • Health coverage for you and your family in many locations
  • Flexible locations and schedules
  • Generous vacation days
  • Up to $2000 (or local currency equivalent) matching for financial donations
  • Up to 40 hours per year for volunteer projects
  • Minimum 16 weeks parental leave
Last updated Sep 24, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
Elastic logo

About Elastic

The open source platform that powers search, observability, security, and more ...

Power insights and outcomes with The Elastic Search AI Platform. See into your data and find answers that matter with enterprise solutions designed to help you accelerate time to insight.

searchobservabilitysecurityAIenterprise solutionsvector database
Company profileWebsite

More open roles at Elastic