Senior Engineer, Competitive Benchmarking & Performance

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.

What is The Role

Elasticsearch powers search, observability, and AI retrieval (RAG) for the world's largest organizations. We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to lead competitive benchmarking initiatives within the Elasticsearch Performance team. 

You will develop representative workloads, automate reproducible experiments, and investigate how Elasticsearch compares with alternative systems. Your work will identify performance strengths, gaps, and tradeoffs, guide engineering improvements, and help customers make informed technical decisions.

This is a hands-on engineering role focused on building benchmarks and investigating performance, with technical publishing as a shared responsibility alongside engineering and content partners.

A typical investigation might ask how Elasticsearch and an alternative system compare under concurrent ingestion and hybrid search, at comparable retrieval quality and cost, and which engineering changes would improve the outcome. This role offers the opportunity to connect deep performance analysis with product improvements and public technical work.

What You Will Be Doing

• Own prioritized competitive benchmarking initiatives across search, vector and hybrid retrieval, and analytical and observability workloads.
• Build and maintain automated benchmark harnesses, datasets, query sets, and load profiles that reflect real-world usage, including concurrent ingestion and querying.
• Design fair comparisons with documented system versions, configurations, tuning decisions, resource budgets, and functional differences.
• Evaluate latency distributions, throughput, resource consumption, and cost efficiency. For retrieval workloads, measure performance at comparable recall or relevance targets.
• Adapt and extend workload-appropriate tools such as Elasticsearch Rally, ClickBench, and vector search benchmark frameworks.
• Investigate performance differences using profiling, system metrics, and controlled experiments; collaborate with engineering teams to identify causes and validate improvements.
• Evaluate relevant self-managed and managed cloud deployments, including serverless offerings, accounting for scaling behavior and service constraints.
• Work with engineering and technical content partners to publish reproducible benchmark artifacts and clear technical reports that explain methodology, findings, limitations, and tradeoffs.
• Partner with engineering and product management to prioritize benchmark coverage and translate findings into actionable product improvements.

What You Bring 

• Solid software engineering skills, with experience building maintainable automation and analysis tools in Python or another relevant programming language.
• Hands-on experience evaluating and diagnosing performance in distributed systems, databases, or search infrastructure.
• Depth in at least one relevant area (search, vector retrieval, analytical databases, or observability systems) and the ability to learn unfamiliar systems.
• Experience designing representative datasets and workloads, including query patterns, concurrency, and ingestion behavior.
• Sound experimental judgment, including repeated measurements, variability analysis, warm-up and cache effects, and the distinction between meaningful changes and measurement noise.
• Experience building reproducible test environments and documenting configurations, procedures, and results.
• Clear technical writing and communication skills, with the ability to explain complex findings and their limitations.
• Solid collaboration skills and the ability to turn performance evidence into applicable engineering recommendations.

Bonus Points

• Experience with Elasticsearch, Lucene, Rally, ClickBench, or vector search benchmark frameworks.
• Experience measuring retrieval quality alongside latency, throughput, and resource usage.
• Familiarity with cloud performance and cost analysis, including autoscaling and serverless systems.
• Public technical writing, open-source contributions, or published benchmark studies.

Compensation for this role is in the form of base salary.  This role does not have a variable compensation component.  

The typical starting salary range for new hires in this role is listed below.  In select locations (including Seattle WA, Los Angeles CA, the San Francisco Bay Area CA, and the New York City Metro Area), an alternate range may apply as specified below. 

These ranges represent the lowest to highest salary we reasonably and in good faith believe we would pay for this role at the time of this posting.  We may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range, and the ranges may be modified in the future.  

An employee's position within the salary range will be based on several factors including, but not limited to, relevant education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, geographic location, performance, and business or organizational needs.

Elastic believes that employees should have the opportunity to share in the value that we create together for our shareholders. Therefore, in addition to cash compensation, this role is currently eligible to participate in Elastic's stock program.  Our total rewards package also includes a company-matched 401k with dollar-for-dollar matching up to 6% of eligible earnings, along with a range of other benefits offered with a holistic emphasis on employee well-being.

The typical starting salary range for this role is:

$133,100—$210,600 USD

The typical starting salary range for this role in the select locations listed above is:

$159,900—$252,900 USD

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.

We strive to have parity of benefits across regions and while regulations differ from place to place, we believe taking care of our people is the right thing to do.

• Competitive pay based on the work you do here and not your previous salary
• Health coverage for you and your family in many locations
• Ability to craft your calendar with flexible locations and schedules for many roles
• Generous number of vacation days each year
• Increase your impact - We match up to $2000 (or local currency equivalent) for financial donations and service
• Up to 40 hours each year to use toward volunteer projects you love
• Embracing parenthood with minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave

Different people approach problems differently. We need that. Elastic is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to creating an inclusive culture that celebrates different perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, ethnicity, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, disability status, or any other basis protected by federal, state or local law, ordinance or regulation.

We welcome individuals with disabilities and strive to create an accessible and inclusive experience for all individuals. To request an accommodation during the application or the recruiting process, please email [email protected]. We will reply to your request within 24 business hours of submission.

Applicants have rights under Federal Employment Laws, view posters linked below: Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) Poster; Pay Transparency Nondiscrimination Provision Poster; Employee Polygraph Protection Act (EPPA) Poster and Know Your Rights (Poster)

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