Join Elastic as a Sr. Software Engineer to build internal applications that enhance operational efficiency using AI and backend technologies.
Posted by employer 2 days ago
First seen on Joblaze 1 day ago
Last verified on the company career page 1 day ago
Skills & Technologies
What you'll build
- Build internal applications that replace paid, specialized tools.
- Design and evolve shared, versioned building blocks.
- Own what you build for its whole life.
- Help set the team's standards for architecture and testing.
- Integrate with other systems safely and efficiently.
Must have
- Senior-level experience designing, shipping and maintaining production backend systems.
- Strong API and data design.
- Experience integrating with other systems.
- Security-first thinking about authorization and sensitive data.
- Strong experience in TypeScript, Python, Java or a comparable language.
Nice to have
- Hands-on experience with Elasticsearch.
- Observability: logs, metrics, traces and alerting.
- LLM features: retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), embeddings.
- A degree in Computer Science or a related field.
Role intensity
70% hands-on coding
AI in the day-to-day
Daily, disciplined use of AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot or similar) on production work.
Requirements
- Education
- Bachelor's degree
Not disclosed in this posting: years of experience, visa sponsorship.
Benefits
Joblaze summary
In this role, the Senior Software Engineer focuses on building and maintaining internal applications that replace costly SaaS tools, ensuring they run efficiently and securely. Proficiency in TypeScript, Python, or Java is essential, along with strong skills in API and data design, security, and search fundamentals. This position is ideal for experienced engineers who excel in backend system design and are comfortable taking ownership of their projects throughout their lifecycle. The team emphasizes a disciplined, hands-on approach to development, leveraging AI tools to enhance productivity.
Joblaze insights
- Listed yesterday — first seen on Joblaze November 11, 2026. Last confirmed on Elastic's careers page November 11, 2026.
- This exact title is also open at 1 other location at Elastic: United States.
- Salary band is below the typical range for Backend roles (median ~$180,000).
- Starts above 7% of 161 comparable senior backend roles in United States that list Python we track (median $175,000 across 65 companies). See Python salary trends
- Python appears in 40.2% of 520 comparable senior backend roles in United States; Elasticsearch appears in 5.2% of 520 comparable senior backend roles in United States.
Quick facts
- Is the Sr. Software Engineer - IT Software Engineering role remote?
- Yes — Elastic lists this as a fully remote position.
- What's the salary range?
- Elastic lists $133,100–$210,600 for this role.
- What's the tech stack?
- Joblaze extracted these technologies from the posting: Elasticsearch, Java, Python, TypeScript.
- What seniority level is this role?
- Elastic targets senior candidates for this position.
- Is this full-time or contract?
- Full-time for this Sr. Software Engineer - IT Software Engineering 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
Could we build a better version of an expensive SaaS tool on Elasticsearch? Our new IT Software Engineering team asks that question about the software Elastic pays for, and then we build the answer. Each system helps run the company day to day and becomes a reference architecture for Elastic's own products.
We're a team of builders, and this is a hands-on, 100% individual contributor role. Every engineer here owns their work end to end: shaping the problem, designing the system, shipping it, and keeping it healthy for years. 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.
- You like writing specs and recording design decisions, and you let tests and checks, not claims, decide when something is done.
- Daily, disciplined use of AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot or similar) on production work.
Bonus Points
- Hands-on experience with Elasticsearch
- Observability: logs, metrics, traces and alerting.
- LLM features: retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), embeddings, LLM gateways and evaluations.
- A degree in Computer Science or a related field.
Compensation for this role is in the form of base salary. This role does not have a variable compensation component.
The typical starting salary range for new hires in this role is listed below. In select locations (including Seattle WA, Los Angeles CA, the San Francisco Bay Area CA, and the New York City Metro Area), an alternate range may apply as specified below.
These ranges represent the lowest to highest salary we reasonably and in good faith believe we would pay for this role at the time of this posting. We may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range, and the ranges may be modified in the future.
An employee's position within the salary range will be based on several factors including, but not limited to, relevant education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, geographic location, performance, and business or organizational needs.
Elastic believes that employees should have the opportunity to share in the value that we create together for our shareholders. Therefore, in addition to cash compensation, this role is currently eligible to participate in Elastic's stock program. Our total rewards package also includes a company-matched 401k with dollar-for-dollar matching up to 6% of eligible earnings, along with a range of other benefits offered with a holistic emphasis on employee well-being.
Additional Information - We Take Care of Our People
Please see here for our Privacy Statement.
Standard company text repeated across Elastic's postings is omitted here.