Principal Software Engineer I - Platform Billing Core

📋 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

Elastic is a distributed company where diversity drives our identity. We strive to have parity of benefits across regions and believe taking care of our people is the right thing to do. We offer competitive pay, health coverage, flexible locations and schedules, generous vacation days, parental leave, and more.

🎯 The Role

Billing powers Elastic's Cloud business. It runs across AWS, GCP, and Azure in over 50 regions. We oversee usage-based metering, consumption billing, and marketplace integrations at global scale. The Billing Core team owns the data layer that makes billing correct, auditable, and automated. We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to drive technical direction within the Billing Core domain. This is a hands-on role where you will design systems, improve how we operate, and work across teams.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Own complex billing and account management systems that span multiple services and cloud providers.
• Build large-scale data pipelines for billing data ingestion, transformation, and reconciliation.
• Improve observability, incident response, and reliability of core billing systems using modern DevOps practices.
• Shape system architecture for scale and modularity. Guide service design, API structure, and data modelling.
• Work with SRE and Cloud teams to improve deployment, monitoring, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Own PostgreSQL data architecture and performance. Focus on query speed, schema quality, and high availability.
• Be the go-to technical reviewer for the billing core stack. Maintain technical consistency and quality standards.
• Mentor engineers and tech leads across the Billing organization. Help raise the bar on design and operational standards.
• Work with Product, Design, and Finance to set roadmap priorities. Make sure plans are feasible and aligned with business goals.
• Take part in on-call rotations. Make sure systems are production-ready through automation, resilience testing, and alerting.

📌 Required Qualifications

• 8+ years in backend or platform engineering, with solid skills in Python and PostgreSQL (schema design, performance, high availability).
• Proven experience improving reliability, observability, and incident response in production systems.
• Solid background in cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including networking, IAM, monitoring, and deployment.
• Ability to lead multi-quarter projects across teams — building consensus and delivering results.
• Track record of mentoring engineers, setting technical direction, and raising engineering standards.
• Experience with SaaS billing, metering, or financial systems is a real plus.
• Clear written and verbal communication skills. Able to influence across teams and speak to both technical and non-technical partners.
• Comfortable working on your own in a global, distributed, and async environment.
• Able to work across projects, work across functions and teams, and adapt to changing team structures.
• Track record of using AI to speed up development, debug complex systems, and improve code quality — while owning the outcomes.
• Eligible to work in Department of Defense (DoD) Impact Level 4 or above cloud service environments.

🎁 Benefits

Competitive pay based on the work you do here and not your previous salary. 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. 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.

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

Eligible to work in Department of Defense (DoD) Impact Level 4 or above cloud service environments.