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

Could we build a better version of an expensive SaaS tool on Elasticsearch in twelve weeks? Our new IT Software Engineering team asks that question about the software Elastic pays for. Then we build the answer, and we own it for years. Every system we build helps run the company day to day and becomes a reference architecture for Elastic's own products.

We are a small team of three to four engineers, and this is a hands-on, 100% individual contributor role. Knowing what to build, and what not to build, matters more here than typing speed.

What this role is not

Not a front-end role. The user interface follows a shared kit and is the simplest part of the work.
Not a prototype or demo role. What we ship runs in production and is maintained for years.
Not vibe coding. We use AI to build faster, not to skip design, review or testing.
Not SaaS administration or configuration, and not an infrastructure-only or DevOps-only role.
Not a people-management role.

What You Will Be Doing

Take an open business problem, decide what to build and what to leave out, and turn it into a clear spec, data model and API contracts.
Build internal applications that replace paid, specialized tools.
Solve the hard parts that all of these applications share:
reading data from several systems of record accurately and efficiently, without overloading or slowing those systems down
storing sensitive data so it never leaks
enforcing permissions on the server, so each person sees only the records and fields they are allowed to see
Design and evolve the shared, versioned building blocks that every application is built from: data connectors, authorization, data storage and migrations, search, and reporting.
Build with AI coding agents such as Claude Code inside a disciplined, spec-driven process. Acceptance criteria are traced to tests, interface contracts get compatibility checks, and small slices are reviewed and proven before the next one starts. Automated quality gates decide when work is done.
Own what you build for its whole life: review, testing, releases, production operations including on-call, new features, maintenance and, eventually, retirement.
Help set the team's standards for architecture, contracts, testing and observability, and feed what you learn back into Elastic's products.

What You Bring

Senior-level experience designing, shipping and maintaining production backend systems through failures and changing requirements, not just launching them.
Sound judgment about what to build, what to leave out, and how to keep a system simple as its requirements change. You apply abstraction, separation of concerns, single responsibility, SOLID and common design patterns where they fit.
Strong API and data design: clear contracts and careful data models, and the ability to change both without breaking the people who depend on them.
Experience integrating with other systems (APIs, databases, event streams) safely and efficiently.
Security-first thinking about authorization and sensitive data.
Search fundamentals. You can explain:
how information is indexed and how text is processed
how results are scored and ranked
when to use keyword, vector (semantic) or hybrid search
Strong experience in TypeScript, Python, Java or a comparable language. We build in TypeScript, and engineers from other backgrounds who want to work in TypeScript are welcome.
Comfort building with AI coding agents and reviewing their output skeptically. You hold yourself accountable for everything that ships.