Principal Software Engineer I - Platform Billing Experience

📋 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

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 Role

The Billing Experience team owns the customer-facing layer of our billing systems. We build and maintain the public and internal APIs, as well as the billing and account pages within Elastic Cloud consoles. Our goal is to make it easy for customers and internal teams to understand and manage their billing data.

We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to drive technical direction within the Billing Experience domain. This is a hands-on role. You will design APIs, shape user-facing systems, and work across teams. You will help our billing services grow in scale, reliability, and developer productivity. You will work closely with Product, Design, SRE, and Cloud Infrastructure teams.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Own complex billing and account management systems, including public APIs, internal APIs, and Cloud console experiences.
• Lead API design and evolution — set standards for contract stability, versioning, and developer experience across internal and external consumers.
• Build and improve full-stack features in Elastic Cloud consoles, from backend services to frontend billing and account UIs.
• Improve observability, incident response, and reliability of billing-facing services using modern DevOps practices.
• Shape system architecture for scale and modularity. Guide service design, API structure, and data modeling.
• Work with SRE and Cloud teams to improve deployment, monitoring, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Be the go-to technical reviewer for the billing experience 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 full-stack engineering, with solid skills in API design and development.
• Proven experience building and maintaining developer-facing or customer-facing APIs at scale.
• Solid background in cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including networking, IAM, monitoring, and deployment.
• Experience with frontend technologies used in console or dashboard products is a plus (React or similar).
• 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, collaborate across functions and teams, and adapt to changing team structures.
• Track record of using AI to accelerate up development, debug complex systems, and improve code quality — while owning the outcomes.

⭐ Desirable Experience

• Experience with SaaS billing, metering, or financial systems is a real plus.

🎁 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

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

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