How much experience is required?

At least 5 years of relevant experience for this Senior Java Software Engineer - Search Inference - Platform role.

What's the tech stack?

Joblaze extracted these technologies from the posting: AI, Elasticsearch, Java, REST.

What seniority level is this role?

Elastic targets senior candidates for this position.

Senior Java Software Engineer - Search Inference - Platform at Elastic

Joblaze summary

In this role, the Senior Java Software Engineer focuses on developing and maintaining the Inference API within the Elasticsearch team, ensuring seamless integration with various machine learning services. Key skills include extensive Java experience, particularly in crafting APIs and understanding concurrency, as well as familiarity with AI systems. This position is ideal for seasoned developers who can navigate complex codebases and collaborate across teams. The company values diversity and offers a flexible work environment, emphasizing a balance between professional and personal life.

Joblaze insights

Listed today — first seen on Joblaze October 8, 2026. Last confirmed on Elastic's careers page October 8, 2026.
This exact title is also open at 4 other locations at Elastic: Spain, Portugal, Greece, Ireland.
Java appears in 18.4% of 38 comparable senior backend roles in United Kingdom; Elasticsearch appears in 2.6% of 38 comparable senior backend roles in United Kingdom.

Quick facts

How much experience is required?: At least 5 years of relevant experience for this Senior Java Software Engineer - Search Inference - Platform role.
What's the tech stack?: Joblaze extracted these technologies from the posting: AI, Elasticsearch, Java, REST.
What seniority level is this role?: Elastic targets senior candidates for this position.
Is this full-time or contract?: Full-time for this Senior Java Software Engineer - Search Inference - Platform role at Elastic.

From the original posting

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 Developer to join our Elasticsearch team and drive our work on the Inference API in Elasticsearch.

The Elasticsearch Inference API is the integration layer between Elasticsearch and external machine learning services including Elastic's own Elastic Inference Service (EIS), third-party providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, Cohere, Google), and self-hosted models. It powers features like semantic search, reranking, and generative AI across Elastic Cloud and in hosted environments.

You'll maintain and develop the plugin framework and REST API with your work spanning protocol design, streaming, async execution, billing integration, and with a tight collaboration with the wider inference team and the Kibana team.

What You Will Be Doing

Build and maintain integrations with internal systems and external inference providers, including schema negotiation, streaming (SSE), and error normalisation
Contribute to the inference plugin's internal architecture: task settings, chunking strategies, rate limiting, and provider-level configuration
Review open source contributions to the codebase and work with third party engineers to ensure their contributions meet our technology standards
Participate in on-call rotation for inference-related incidents
Write thorough tests: unit tests using ESTestCase, YAML-based REST integration tests, and rolling-upgrade tests

What You Bring

5+ years of production Java experience, with experience contributing to a large, established Java codebase. You know core Java and are conversant in the standard library of data structures and concurrency constructs, as well as newer language features.
Experience crafting ergonomic APIs and the ability to reason through tradeoffs.
Experience with low-level Java such as concurrency, parallelism, classloaders, etc.
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

Knowledge of JDK internals: modules, the Java memory model, garbage collection, database load, caching techniques, etc.
Experience with ML systems
Contributions to and ownership of open source projects
Knowledge of Java build tools (Gradle, Maven, etc), with a strong preference for Gradle experience.
Experience working in a platform team or developer productivity team

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