Search - Search Inference - Software Engineer II

Elastic, the Search AI Company, enables everyone to find the answers they need in real time, using all their data, at scale — unleashing the potential of businesses and people. The Elastic Search AI Platform, used by more than 50% of the Fortune 500, brings together the precision of search and the intelligence of AI to enable everyone to accelerate the results that matter. By taking advantage of all structured and unstructured data — securing and protecting private information more effectively — Elastic’s complete, cloud-based solutions for search, security, and observability help organizations deliver on the promise of AI.

The Search Inference team is responsible for bringing performant, ergonomic, and cost effective machine learning (ML) model inference to Search workflows. ML inference has become a crucial part of the modern search experience whether used for query understanding, semantic search, RAG, or any other GenAI use-case. Our goal is to simplify ML inference in Search workflows by focusing on large scale inference capabilities for embeddings and reranking models that are available across the Elasticsearch user base. As a team, we are a collaborative, cross-functional group with backgrounds in information retrieval, natural language processing, and distributed systems. We provide thought leadership across a variety of mediums including open code repositories, publishing blogs, and speaking at conferences. We focus on matching the expectations of our customers along the lines of throughput, latency, and cost.

We are currently looking to hire this position on the East Coast of the US or Canada. Relocation is not offered. 

What you will be doing

• You will be building product enhancements for search components with contributions to Elasticsearch and Kibana, as well as to distributed machine learning infrastructure.You will work closely with other software development engineers and site reliability engineers to ensure solutions are highly available, maintainable, scalable, secure, and meet compliance requirements.
• You will collaborate with teammates in a mostly text-based, asynchronous, remote-first team environment with occasional video calls and annual conferences.
• You’ll be hands-on with the team and codebase, reviewing work and providing constructive feedback.
• You will collaborate with the team on features, breaking them down into technical deliverables. You’ll act as an important and communicative part of an engaged and spirited team.
• You will create, audit, and fine tune key performance indicators (KPIs) of the search components built by the team to meet the relevance, performance, scalability, and security goals.

What you will bring

• 3+ years experience as a professional software developer with at least one object-oriented programming language.
• 3+ years experience contributing to large scale distributed systems.
• Experience with Docker/containerization and Kubernetes in production environments.
• Excellent practical judgment. You know how to prioritize, when to collaborate and ask for help, and when to be independent.
• Knowledge of modern machine learning, NLP and information retrieval are a big bonus.
• Measured and articulate written and spoken communication skills. You work well with others and can craft concise and expressive thoughts into correspondence: issues, investigations, documentation and onboarding material.
• An interest in learning new tools, languages, workflows and philosophies that can help you grow. You can function well in an environment that drives towards change.

Our Team Style

• We appreciate articulate and “low ego” people who want to grow as part of a team.
• We welcome diversity in all forms. We embrace strange and risky ideas and appreciate characters of all sorts.
• We hold each other accountable and work to a high standard. We take pride in the frequent, safe and graceful delivery of innovative and valuable features.
• We embrace open communication and challenge. We appreciate positivity and vigilance and strive for autonomy, trust, and personal and professional growth.

If this sounds interesting, we would love to hear from you! Please include whatever info you believe is relevant: resume, GitHub profile, code samples, blog posts and writing samples, links to personal projects, etc.

Additional Information - We Take Care of Our People

As a distributed company, diversity drives our identity. Whether you’re looking to launch a new career or grow an existing one, Elastic is the type of company where you can balance great work with great life. Your age is only a number. It doesn’t matter if you’re just out of college or your children are; we need you for what you can do.

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