Senior Engineer, Competitive Benchmarking & Performance
Level inferred from job title
Job description
A hands-on senior software engineering role in Elastic's Elasticsearch Performance team, leading competitive benchmarking initiatives across search, vector and hybrid retrieval, and analytical and observability workloads. The work builds reproducible benchmarks and technical reports that guide engineering improvements and inform customer decisions.
At a glance
- Work mode
- Remote
- Languages
- English
What you'll do
- 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 we're looking for
- 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
Nice to have
- 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
Your team
Elasticsearch Performance team
Apply
About Elastic
The Search AI Company
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.
Mission
Enables everyone to find the answers they need in real time, using all their data, at scale — unleashing the potential of businesses and people.
Key facts
- The Elastic Search AI Platform is used by more than 50% of the Fortune 500
- Distributed company
- Matches up to $2000 (or local currency equivalent) for financial donations and service
- Up to 40 hours each year for volunteer projects
- Minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave
What they value
- Diversity drives our identity
- Balance great work with great life
- Parity of benefits across regions
- Taking care of our people