Principal Software Engineer

Who you are

• We appreciate articulate and “low ego” people who want to grow as part of a team
• 10+ years building distributed, production SaaS services—at least 5 years leading large-scale Node/TypeScript or similar back-end stacks
• Deep expertise in distributed systems fundamentals—shard routing, consensus, eventual consistency, back-pressure, and circuit-breaker patterns
• Demonstrated success designing high-throughput, low-latency APIs (gRPC / REST / WebSocket)—including streaming responses and resumable sessions
• Hands-on experience with observability: OpenTelemetry, log/metric pipelines, synthetic checks, and SLO dashboards
• Exposure to LLM tooling (LangChain/LangGraph, OpenAI function calls, vector-search, RAG orchestration) and enthusiasm for advancing GenAI architectures
• Clear, persuasive written communication—your ADRs and RFCs set the standard others emulate
• Nice-to-have: contribution history to Kibana or other large SPAs; ability to prototype front-end dashboards when it unblocks back-end work

What the job involves

• Elastic is building Agent Builder, a conversational platform that connects production agents to real customer business data in Elasticsearch
• As a Principal Engineer, you will set technical direction and drive the Kibana backend architecture for the agentic platform: streaming APIs, secure tool execution, session and memory persistence, retrieval and citations contracts, and evaluation telemetry
• Your influence will extend beyond a single feature, shaping service boundaries, reliability posture, and standards that other solutions build on
• Own the architecture for chat back-end services (Node/TypeScript), defining service boundaries, data contracts, and scalability targets
• Lead cross-team design reviews; author ADRs and RFCs that become reference standards for AI-chat and ingestion work
• Build and harden event-driven pipelines that capture chat telemetry, evaluation traces, and LLM feedback loops; expose them via self-service analytics endpoints
• Champion reliability—define error budgets, introduce testing strategy, and steer incident-response playbooks for conversational workloads
• Mentor senior and junior engineers; grow their system-design skills and foster a high-trust, low-ego culture
• Partner with Product, Design, and Data Science to translate ambiguous goals (e.g., “multi-step reasoning with tool calling”) into incremental, testable action items
• Represent Elastic in open-source AI communities (LangGraph/LangChain, MCP/A2A) through design proposals, blog posts, and conference talks

Benefits

• Toast to your health: Fully paid health coverage for you and your family, in many locations.
• Craft your calendar: Flexible location and schedule for most roles.
• Create space for you: Distributed by design workforce, plus generous number of vacation days each year.
• Embrace parenthood: Minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave, plus generous family formation benefits.
• Give back your time: 40 hours each year to use toward volunteering with organizations and causes you’re passionate about.
• Amplify your impact: Double your charitable giving — we match donations up to $1500 USD (or local currency equivalent).