Principal Software Engineer - Builder Experience - Platform Engineering Productivity

📋 Job Overview

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.

🏢 About Elastic

As a distributed company, diversity drives our identity. Whether you’re looking to launch a new career or grow an existing one, Elastic is the type of company where you can balance great work with great life. Your age is only a number. It doesn’t matter if you’re just out of college or your children are; we need you for what you can do.

🎯 The Role

Join our Platform Engineering Productivity team as a Principal Software Engineer on AI Enablement and Developer Experience. We're looking for a systems thinker who is curious by nature, stays ahead of the curve on AI and emerging tooling, and takes ownership not just of what the team builds but of how the entire engineering org works.

In this role, you'll shape how Elastic engineers build and ship — making AI a genuine accelerant in the development lifecycle while ensuring our products reach customers with high quality. If you thrive in ambiguity, operate with high agency, and are energized by work that multiplies the effectiveness of every team around you, we'd love to hear from you.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Define the technical vision for AI-assisted development across the org from agent context standards and shared skills to LLM-backed tooling embedded in everyday engineering workflows.
• Identify the highest-leverage points in the SDLC where AI can meaningfully reduce toil, then build and ship the tooling to capture that leverage.
• Design the guardrails that make AI adoption fast and safe — quality gates, security boundaries, and measurement that tells us whether it's actually working.
• Improve CI infrastructure reliability and efficiency, and build the systems that produce releasable artifacts.
• Enable ephemeral developer environments and build tooling for product deployment and release.
• Define and enforce release quality gates that scale across teams.
• Own the metrics that matter: cycle time, adoption, toil reduction — and use them to drive where the team invests next.
• Review code to uphold engineering standards, improve performance, and catch defects early.
• Partner with engineering and product leadership to align on requirements, testing strategy, and delivery goals.
• Drive clear technical communication and alignment across teams, and produce high-quality documentation for systems, processes, and architectural decisions.
• Mentor engineers and cultivate a culture where code quality, pragmatism, and AI fluency reinforce each other.

📌 Required Qualifications

• Deep, hands-on fluency with AI-assisted development — integrating LLM APIs into production systems and applying a prompt-engineering mindset to real domain problems.
• The judgment to know when AI is the right answer and when it isn't, and the credibility to make that call across the organization.
• Comfort moving fluidly across projects, codebases, and evolving team structures — and helping others do the same.
• High agency and full ownership of outcomes, with a systems-thinking approach to problems that span team boundaries.
• Natural curiosity — you teach yourself new tools and approaches without being asked.

🎁 Benefits

Competitive pay based on the work you do here and not your previous salary. The typical starting salary range for this role is: €73,300 - €115,900 EUR.

Health coverage for you and your family in many locations. Ability to craft your calendar with flexible locations and schedules for many roles. Generous number of vacation days each year. Increase your impact - We match up to $2000 (or local currency equivalent) for financial donations and service. Up to 40 hours each year to use toward volunteer projects you love. Embracing parenthood with minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave.

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

Elasticsearch develops and distributes encryption software and technology that is subject to U.S. export controls and licensing requirements for individuals who are located in or are nationals of the following sanctioned countries and regions: Belarus, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Syria, the Crimea Region of Ukraine, the Donetsk People’s Republic (“DNR”), and the Luhansk People’s Republic (“LNR”). If you are located in or are a national of one of the listed countries or regions, an export license may be required as a condition of your employment in this role. Please note that national origin and/or nationality do not affect eligibility for employment with Elastic.