Senior Software Engineer - Vector Search - Elasticsearch

About the role

Elastic is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join its Elasticsearch - Search Relevance team, which works on a robust, feature-rich search experience and contributes to improving search in Lucene. The engineer contributes to the technical direction and vision of search, including new features, enhancements and bug fixes. The team is globally distributed, collaborating over email, GitHub, Zoom and Slack.

Key responsibilities

• Lead initiatives within Elasticsearch to deliver an industry-leading search engine with speed and relevance.
• Build new search features and fix bugs, keeping the code easy to understand, and invent or implement new algorithms and data structures.
• Work with a globally distributed team on the vector search capabilities of Elasticsearch.
• Identify and drive improvements in Elasticsearch search relevance.
• Work with community members worldwide on issues and pull requests, triaging or handling them.
• Write idiomatic modern Java (Elasticsearch is 99.8% Java).

Required profile

• Implemented novel techniques in vector similarity on a large-scale search platform, or advanced academic research in vector similarity information retrieval.
• Professional experience with search or vector databases, using HNSW, IVF or similar algorithms and libraries at scale.
• Solid core Java skills, including the standard library, data structures, concurrency and lambdas.
• High autonomy, able to own projects from start to finish and work collaboratively, giving and receiving feedback on code and APIs.
• Experience with several data storage technologies such as Elasticsearch, Solr, PostgreSQL, MongoDB or Cassandra.
• Proven use of AI to accelerate development, debug complex systems and optimize code.
• Ability to collaborate across functions and teams and switch between projects and codebases.

Required skills

• Core Java
• Vector similarity search (HNSW, IVF)
• Data storage technologies (Elasticsearch, Solr, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Cassandra)

Bonus points

• Previous work with Elasticsearch
• Open source experience and CI workflows
• Cross-functional initiative leadership

Compensation is a base salary only, with no variable component. The typical starting range is EUR 85,600 to EUR 135,500. Benefits include health coverage, flexible schedules, generous vacation days, a donation matching program, volunteer time and parental leave.