Principal Software Engineer

Elastic
United States
Workplace: OnsiteFull timeUSD 135,700 - 214,700 annuallyFunction: Software EngineeringSkills: ["Architectural judgment","Written communication","Strategic thinking","Cross-functional collaboration","Data-driven decision making"]

Lead Elastic’s build-vs-buy engineering for internal IT platforms, partnering with IT leadership, Finance, and Engineering to replace high-cost SaaS tools with Elastic-native systems. Own architecture, engineering standards, build plans, and delivery across developer productivity, FinOps/AI cost governance, IT service management, and enterprise efficiency. Deeply run Elasticsearch at production scale while setting technical patterns and ensuring systems get adopted company-wide.

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Elastic
Elastic
2 days ago

Principal Software Engineer

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Last checked: 2 hours agoStatus: Live

Job Summary

Lead Elastic’s build-vs-buy engineering for internal IT platforms, partnering with IT leadership, Finance, and Engineering to replace high-cost SaaS tools with Elastic-native systems. Own architecture, engineering standards, build plans, and delivery across developer productivity, FinOps/AI cost governance, IT service management, and enterprise efficiency. Deeply run Elasticsearch at production scale while setting technical patterns and ensuring systems get adopted company-wide.
Location: United States
Workplace: Onsite
Employment Type: Full time
Job Function: Software Engineering
Seniority: Mid level

Key Responsibilities

  • •Lead build-vs-buy engineering to evaluate Elastic’s internal SaaS portfolio and plan prioritized replacements using Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Elastic AI capabilities.
  • •Design and build Elastic-native internal platforms across productivity tools, FinOps/AI cost governance, IT service management, and enterprise efficiency systems.
  • •Establish and own architectural standards, design patterns, and engineering practices for IT platform engineering work, including data models, APIs, observability, cost governance, and security posture.
  • •Partner with IT infrastructure, Security, Platform Engineering, Finance, and tool owners to align on requirements, challenge assumptions, and drive adoption.
  • •Dogfood and validate Elastic’s technology by running internal reference-architecture systems that inform product and go-to-market strategy.

Pay and Benefits

Salary: USD 135,700 - 214,700 annually
Equity and Bonus:Equity
Perks:401kHealth InsuranceParental LeavePaid LeaveVolunteer Hours

Key Requirements

  • •15+ years of software engineering experience, including at least 3 years as a principal engineer.
  • •Deep, hands-on expertise with Elasticsearch at scale (data modeling, query design, aggregations, performance tuning, production operations).
  • •Strong full-stack ability to build end-to-end systems (Logstash pipelines to Kibana dashboards and a React frontend).
  • •Proven track record of originating and shipping commercial/platform systems, not only maintaining existing ones.
  • •Architectural judgment and strong written communication to produce decision records, standards, and build-vs-buy analyses.
Experience:Enterprise softwareSaaS replacementPlatform engineeringFinOpsLLM/RAG
Skills:Architectural judgmentWritten communicationStrategic thinkingCross-functional collaborationData-driven decision making
Languages:English
Tech Stack:ElasticsearchKibanaElastic MLELSERVector searchWatcherElastic SecuritySIEMLogstashReactLLM GatewayRAG pipelinesElasticsearch ObservabilityAWSGCPAzureAnthropicOpenAI CodexGitHub CopilotGoogle Gemini

Company Brief

Elastic
Builds the Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, Logstash) and provides search, observability, and security solutions that enable organizations to search, analyze, and protect data in real time across applications, infrastructure, and enterprises.
Industry: Data Infrastructure
Company Size: Enterprise (1,001+ employees)
Revenue: USD 1B+
Growth: Public Company
Valuation: Public Company (Market Cap in USD)
Funding: IPO / Publicly Listed
Headquarters: Amsterdam, Netherlands
Founded: 2012
WebsiteLinkedIn