Senior Java Engineer - JDK Internals, Concurrency

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

We are on the lookout for a Senior Java Engineer to join our Elasticsearch Core Infra team. The mission of the Elasticsearch Core/Infra team is to create the foundational infrastructure that enables engineers to develop, extend and support Elasticsearch. The team owns common functionality such as services, settings and scripting, and makes Elasticsearch extensible through plugins or the Painless scripting language. The team also makes Elasticsearch observable by providing logging and telemetry information.

Our company is distributed by intention. We hire the best engineers we can find wherever they are, whoever they are. As a result, our team is diverse and distributed across continents. We collaborate every day over email, GitHub, Zoom, and Slack. Effective written communication skills are important.

At our best, we write fast, scalable, and intuitive software. We believe that the best way to do that is to code review for every change, decide big things by consensus, and strive for incremental improvements. We believe the team should be aware of how our customers (both technical and non-technical) use our products and be empowered to make bold and impactful decisions.

You will be a strong individual contributor on the team but you will also contribute to and lead cross team projects. We need someone who has great design skills, who can work at a low level of abstraction but can equally communicate technical concepts across a variety of collaborators.

What You Will Be Doing

• Contributing to large, impactful projects that evolve the core infrastructure that underpins Elasticsearch

• Shaping how Elasticsearch runs in Elastic Cloud

• Designing and implementing new horizontally-scalable features and APIs in Elasticsearch

• Understanding and contributing to surrounding layers such as replication and search

• Optimizing internal data structures used within Elasticsearch

• Solving difficult issues, including performance or concurrency issues, and proposing solutions

• Collaborating in the open with the ES team, Elastic users, and other supporting open source projects

• Supporting our support engineers with the harder problems

• Helping to drive our long term technical strategy in relation to changes in the JDK and other core dependencies, for example the deprecation of the security manager.

What You Bring

• Experience crafting APIs and the ability to reason through tradeoffs

• Proficient in algorithms and data structures

• Knowledge of low-level Java such as concurrency, parallelism, classloaders, etc.

• Experience leading large scale projects across engineering teams

• Willingness to dive into new issues and ask for help when you need it

Bonus Points

• Knowledge of JDK internals: modules, the Java memory model, garbage collection, database load, caching techniques, etc.

• Knowledge of low level primitives such as JNI (Java Native Interface), JNA (Java Native Access), ByteBuddy, ASM, bytecode, FFI (Foreign Function Interface), and FFM (Foreign Function and Memory API).

• Knowledge of containers and Kubernetes