Senior Go/Kubernetes Engineer - Core/Infra - Elasticsearch

What is The Role

We are on the lookout for a Senior Kubernetes/Go Engineer to join our Elasticsearch team and focus on ensuring that the shared platform functionalities of Elasticsearch are easy to use, performant, maintainable and secure.

The team’s mission is to create foundational infrastructure and shared functionality 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. We also own the orchestration of Elasticsearch in serverless, the CI/CD workflows and enable Elasticsearch developers to deliver Elasticsearch to customers - serverless, cloud and on-premise alike.

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 drive and communicate technical concepts across a variety of collaborators.

What You Will Be Doing

• Designing, building, and evolving the distributed systems that orchestrate and manage Serverless Elasticsearch projects across cloud service providers.
• Contributing to large, impactful projects that evolve the core infrastructure that underpins Elasticsearch.
• Owning the Kubernetes orchestration of Elasticsearch clusters in cloud.
• Making Elasticsearch developers more productive by identifying and developing opportunities for automation, and integrating agentic apps into development workflows.
• Designing and implementing new horizontally-scalable features and APIs in Elasticsearch.
• Solving difficult issues, including performance or concurrency issues, and proposing solutions.
• Improving operation and observability of Elasticsearch cloud systems.
• Collaborating in the open with the ES team, Elastic users, and other supporting open source projects.
• Supporting our support engineers with the harder problems.
• Owning operational investigations end-to-end, until performance or stability issues are successfully resolved.

What You Bring

• Strong Go skills: you’re fluent with its concurrency primitives (goroutines, channels, sync, context), idiomatic error handling, and newer features like generics. Experience building Kubernetes controllers (controller-runtime, client-go) is a strong plus.
• You have hands-on experience with containers and Kubernetes.
• Experience crafting APIs and the ability to reason through tradeoffs.
• Proficient in algorithms and data structures.
• Experience leading large scale projects across engineering teams.
• Willingness to dive into new issues and ask for help when you need it.
• You are able to own projects from beginning to end. This covers both technical design and working with others to develop needed components.
• You have a proven track record of using AI to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimize code, while still owning the final outcomes.
• You possess the ability to collaborate across functions and teams and seamlessly transition between different projects, codebases, or teams based on business priorities
• You can work autonomously, drive decisions and results in a distributed team by leveraging asynchronous, direct, and transparent communication

Bonus Points

• Experience with Java and the standard Java library of data structures and concurrency constructs.
• Knowledge of JDK internals: modules, the Java memory model, garbage collection, database load, caching techniques, etc.
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD systems and practices (Buildkite, Argo CD, GitOps etc).
• Knowledge of Java build tools (Gradle, Maven, etc), with a strong preference for Gradle experience.
• Experience with observability and telemetry solutions, particularly OpenTelemetry
• Experience working in a platform team or developer productivity team