Elasticsearch - Senior Software Engineer - Vector Search, Gen AI

Elastic is a free and open search company that powers enterprise search, observability, and security solutions built on one technology stack that can be deployed anywhere. From finding documents to monitoring infrastructure to hunting for threats, Elastic makes data usable in real-time and at scale. Thousands of organizations worldwide, including Barclays, Cisco, eBay, Fairfax, ING, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, The Mayo Clinic, NASA, The New York Times, Wikipedia, and Verizon, use Elastic to power mission-critical systems. Founded in 2012, Elastic is a distributed company with Elasticians around the globe. Learn more at elastic.co.

We're looking for a Software Engineer to join the Elasticsearch - Search team.  This globally-distributed team of experienced engineers focuses on delivering a robust and feature-rich search experience, including contributing to improving the search experience in Lucene. This is a senior software engineering role that focuses on enhancing the vector similarity search functionality within Elasticsearch, covering the design and implementation of new vector search features, enhancements to existing vector search functionality, and resolving bugs.

What You Will Be Doing

• You'll be a full time Elasticsearch contributor, building new vector search features and fixing intriguing bugs, all while making the code easier to understand. Sometimes you'll need to invent a new algorithm or data structure. Or find one and implement it. Sometimes you'll need to get close to the operating system and hardware.
• You’ll work with a globally distributed team of experienced engineers focused on the vector search capabilities of Elasticsearch.
• You'll be an expert on how Elasticsearch implements vector similarity in support of search relevance and everyone will turn to you when they have a question about this area. You'll improve this area based on your questions and your instincts.
• You'll work with community members from all over the world on issues and pull requests, sometimes triaging them and handing them off to other experts and sometimes handling them yourself.
• You'll write idiomatic modern Java -- Elasticsearch is 99.8% Java!

What You Bring Along

• You have professional experience with vector similarity and vector databases and have leveraged IVFPQ, HNSW, or other relevant algorithms and libraries on search platforms at scale.
• You have strong skills in core Java and are conversant in the standard library of data structures and concurrency constructs, as well as other features like lambdas.
• You work with a high level of autonomy, and are able to take on projects and guide them from beginning to end. This covers both technical design and working with other engineers to develop needed components.
• You're comfortable developing collaboratively. Giving and receiving feedback on code and approaches and APIs is hard! Bonus points if you've collaborated over the internet because that's harder. Double bonus points for asynchronous collaboration over the internet. That's even harder but we do it anyway because it's the best way we know how to build software. 
• You've used several data storage technologies like Elasticsearch, Solr, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, or Cassandra and have some idea how they work and why they work that way.
• You have excellent verbal and written communication skills. Like we said, collaborating on the internet is hard. We try to be respectful, empathetic, and trusting in all of our interactions. And we'd expect that from you too.

Bonus Points

• You've built things with Elasticsearch before.
• You’ve worked on data storage technology.
• You have experience designing, leading and owning cross-functional initiatives.
• You've worked with open source projects and are familiar with different styles of source control workflow and continuous integration.

Compensation for this role is in the form of base salary.  This role does not have a variable compensation component.  

The typical starting salary range for new hires in this role is listed below.  In select locations (including Seattle WA, Los Angeles CA, the San Francisco Bay Area CA, and the New York City Metro Area), an alternate range may apply as specified below. 

These ranges represent the lowest to highest salary we reasonably and in good faith believe we would pay for this role at the time of this posting.  We may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range, and the ranges may be modified in the future.  

An employee's position within the salary range