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# Principal Java Engineer - Distributed Systems, Serverless - Elasticsearch

- **Company:** ElasticSearch Inc.
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA, United States (Remote available)
- **Experience:** Expert
- **Salary:** $133,000.0 - $211,000.0
- **Contract:** Permanent contract
- **Skills:** Java (Programming Language), Artificial Intelligence, Data Analysis, Apache Lucene, Data Structures, Software Debugging, Distributed Systems, Elasticsearch, Java Development Kit, Codebase, Serverless Computing
- **Published:** July 20, 2026
- **Apply:** https://www.workingnomads.com/job/go/1740279/

## About the Role

* You have a deep background in distributed systems and consensus algorithms.
 * You have strong skills in core Java and are conversant in the standard library of data structures and concurrency constructs, as well as newer language features.
 * You have a deep technical proficiency in algorithms.
 * You have experience building large-scale distributed systems, rather than making use of off-the-shelf services.
 * You have experience building and debugging complex features with a broad impact, running on multiple machines.
 * You are able to own projects from beginning to end. This covers both technical design and working with others to develop needed components.
 * You have experience managing projects involving multiple engineers.
 * You have a proven track record of using AI to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimize code, while still owning the final outcomes.
 * You possess the ability to collaborate across functions and teams and seamlessly transition between different projects, codebases, or teams based on business priorities
 * You can work autonomously, drive decisions and results in a distributed team by leveraging asynchronous, direct, and transparent communication., * Search, analytics, Lucene
 * Strong knowledge of the JDK
 * Asynchronous event-driven network frameworks such as Netty

## Description

* Leveraging your deep distributed systems expertise to design, build, and operate core pieces of our next-generation Serverless Elasticsearch offering, directly impacting the experience of customers worldwide.
 * Improving Elasticsearch's components that support concurrent and consistent indexing across multiple machines.
 * Maintaining our cluster coordination system to keep performance high even though nodes come and go from the cluster and data moves around, while maintaining the safety and liveness properties of the system as a whole.
 * Pushing the limits on the number of shards, nodes, and petabytes that Elasticsearch can handle today.
 * Looking into all kinds of issues, including performance or concurrency issues, and proposing solutions.
 * Supporting our support engineers with the harder problems.
 * Owning operational investigations end-to-end, until performance or stability issues are successfully resolved.


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