Search Inference Software Engineer II at Elastic

Elastic is a leading open-source search company recognized globally for powering enterprise search, observability, and security solutions with a unified technology stack deployable anywhere. From finding documents, monitoring infrastructure to threat hunting, Elastic makes data usable in real-time and at scale. Renowned organizations like Barclays, Cisco, eBay, Fairfax, ING, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, The Mayo Clinic, NASA, The New York Times, Wikipedia, and Verizon leverage Elastic for mission-critical operations. Founded in 2012, Elastic operates as a distributed company with teams spread worldwide. Learn more at .

About the Search Inference Team

The Search Inference team at Elastic focuses on delivering high-performance, user-friendly, and cost-effective machine learning (ML) model inference for Search workflows. Machine learning inference is pivotal in modern search experiences, enhancing query understanding, semantic search, RAG, and other GenAI use-cases. Our mission is to streamline ML inference in Search workflows by improving large-scale inference capabilities for embeddings and reranking models across the Elasticsearch user base. Our team is collaborative, bringing together talents from information retrieval, natural language processing, and distributed systems. We lead thought leadership through open-source contributions, blogs, and conference engagements, focusing on throughput, latency, and cost efficiency.

Responsibilities

As a Search Inference Software Engineer II, you will:

• Build product enhancements for search components, contributing to Elasticsearch, Kibana, and distributed machine learning infrastructure.
• Collaborate with software development and site reliability engineers to ensure solutions are highly available, maintainable, scalable, secure, and meet compliance requirements.
• Work in a mostly text-based, asynchronous, remote-first team environment, supplemented by occasional video calls and annual conferences.
• Engage hands-on with the team and codebase, reviewing work and providing constructive feedback.
• Break down features into technical deliverables and communicate effectively within an engaged and spirited team.
• Create, audit, and refine key performance indicators (KPIs) for search components to meet relevance, performance, scalability, and security goals.

Qualifications

To be successful in this role, you bring:

• 3+ years of experience as a professional software developer with proficiency in at least one object-oriented programming language.
• 3+ years of experience contributing to large-scale distributed systems.
• Experience with Docker/containerization and Kubernetes in production environments.
• Excellent practical judgment, prioritization skills, and ability to know when to collaborate or work independently.
• Knowledge of modern machine learning, NLP, and information retrieval (bonus).
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, able to work well with others and craft concise documentation and onboarding material.
• A keen interest in learning new tools, languages, workflows, and philosophies to foster growth in a dynamic environment.

Our Team Style

Our team values are:

• Clear articulation and a “low ego” mentality to grow as part of a team.
• Diversity in all forms, welcoming strange and risky ideas, and appreciating characters of all kinds.
• Accountability, high standards, and pride in delivering innovative and valuable features safely and gracefully.
• Open communication, positivity, vigilance, and striving for autonomy, trust, and continuous growth.

If this opportunity excites you, we would love to hear from you! Submit your application with relevant info: resume, GitHub profile, code samples, blog posts, writing samples, or links to personal projects.

Compensation

This role offers a competitive base salary with no variable compensation component. The typical starting salary range for new hires is:

$110,900—$175,500 USD

In select locations (Seattle WA, Los Angeles CA, the San Francisco Bay Area CA, and the New York City Metro Area), the salary range is:

$133,200—$210,700 USD

Salaries are based on factors like relevant education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, geographic location, performance, and business needs. This role is eligible for participation in Elastic's stock program. Our total rewards package also includes: