What is The Role

Could we build a better version of an expensive SaaS tool on Elasticsearch? Our new IT Software Engineering team asks that question about the software Elastic pays for, and then we build the answer. Each system helps run the company day to day and becomes a reference architecture for Elastic's own products. We're a team of builders, and this is a hands-on, 100% individual contributor role. Every engineer here owns their work end to end: shaping the problem, designing the system, shipping it, and keeping it healthy for years. Knowing what to build, and what not to build, matters more here than typing speed.

What this role is not:

• Not a front-end role. The user interface follows a shared kit and is the simplest part of the work.
• Not a prototype or demo role. What we ship runs in production and is maintained for years.
• Not vibe coding. We use AI to build faster, not to skip design, review or testing.
• Not SaaS administration or configuration, and not an infrastructure-only or DevOps-only role.
• Not a people-management role.

What You Will Be Doing

• Take an open business problem, decide what to build and what to leave out, and turn it into a clear spec, data model and API contracts.
• Build internal applications that replace paid, specialized tools.
• Solve the hard parts that all of these applications share:
  • reading data from several systems of record accurately and efficiently, without overloading or slowing those systems down
  • storing sensitive data so it never leaks
  • enforcing permissions on the server, so each person sees only the records and fields they are allowed to see
• Design and evolve the shared, versioned building blocks that every application is built from: data connectors, authorization, data storage and migrations, search, and reporting.
• Build with AI coding agents such as Claude Code inside a disciplined, spec-driven process. Acceptance criteria are traced to tests, interface contracts get compatibility checks, and small slices are reviewed and proven before the next one starts. Automated quality gates decide when work is done.
• Own what you build for its whole life: review, testing, releases, production operations including on-call, new features, maintenance and, eventually, retirement.
• Help set the team's standards for architecture, contracts, testing and observability, and feed what you learn back into Elastic's products.

What You Bring

• Senior-level experience designing, shipping and maintaining production backend systems through failures and changing requirements, not just launching them.
• Sound judgment about what to build, what to leave out, and how to keep a system simple as its requirements change. You apply abstraction, separation of concerns, single responsibility, SOLID and common design patterns where they fit.
• Strong API and data design: clear contracts and careful data models, and the ability to change both without breaking the people who depend on them.
• Experience integrating with other systems (APIs, databases, event streams) safely and efficiently.
• Security-first thinking about authorization and sensitive data.
• Search fundamentals. You can explain:
  • how information is indexed and how text is processed
  • how results are scored and ranked
  • when to use keyword, vector (semantic) or hybrid search
• Strong experience in TypeScript, Python, Java or a comparable language. We build in TypeScript, and engineers from other backgrounds who want to work in TypeScript are welcome.
• Comfort building with AI coding agents and reviewing their output skeptically. You hold yourself accountable for everything that ships.
• You like writing specs and recording design decisions, and you let tests and checks, not claims, decide when something is done.
• Daily, disciplined use of AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot or similar) on production work.

Bonus Points

• Hands-on experience with Elasticsearch
• Observability: logs, metrics, traces and alerting.
• LLM features: retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), embeddings, LLM gateways and evaluations.
• A degree in Computer Science or a related field.