Search - Search Inference - Software Engineer II at Elastic

Elastic is a free and open search company that powers enterprise search, observability, and security solutions built on one technology stack that can be deployed anywhere. From finding documents to monitoring infrastructure to hunting for threats, Elastic makes data usable in real-time and at scale. Thousands of organizations worldwide, including Barclays, Cisco, eBay, Fairfax, ING, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, The Mayo Clinic, NASA, The New York Times, Wikipedia, and Verizon, use Elastic to power mission-critical systems. Founded in 2012, Elastic is a distributed company with Elasticians around the globe. 

The Search Inference team is responsible for bringing performant, ergonomic, and cost effective machine learning (ML) model inference to Search workflows. ML inference has become a crucial part of the modern search experience whether used for query understanding, semantic search, RAG, or any other GenAI use-case. Our goal is to simplify ML inference in Search workflows by focusing on large scale inference capabilities for embeddings and reranking models that are available across the Elasticsearch user base. As a team, we are a collaborative, cross-functional group with backgrounds in information retrieval, natural language processing, and distributed systems. We provide thought leadership across a variety of mediums including open code repositories, publishing blogs, and speaking at conferences. We focus on matching the expectations of our customers along the lines of throughput, latency, and cost.

What you will be doing

• You will be building product enhancements for search components with contributions to Elasticsearch and Kibana, as well as to distributed machine learning infrastructure.You will work closely with other software development engineers and site reliability engineers to ensure solutions are highly available, maintainable, scalable, secure, and meet compliance requirements.

• You will collaborate with teammates in a mostly text-based, asynchronous, remote-first team environment with occasional video calls and annual conferences.

• You’ll be hands-on with the team and codebase, reviewing work and providing constructive feedback.

• You will collaborate with the team on features, breaking them down into technical deliverables. You’ll act as an important and communicative part of an engaged and spirited team.

• You will create, audit, and fine tune key performance indicators (KPIs) of the search components built by the team to meet the relevance, performance, scalability, and security goals.

What you will bring

• 3+ years experience as a professional software developer with at least one object-oriented programming language.

• 3+ years experience contributing to large scale distributed systems.

• Experience with Docker/containerization and Kubernetes in production environments.

• Excellent practical judgment. You know how to prioritize, when to collaborate and ask for help, and when to be independent.

• Knowledge of modern machine learning, NLP and information retrieval are a big bonus.

• Measured and articulate written and spoken communication skills. You work well with others and can craft concise and expressive thoughts into correspondence: issues, investigations, documentation and onboarding material.

• An interest in learning new tools, languages, workflows and philosophies that can help you grow. You can function well in an environment that drives towards change.

Our Team Style

• We appreciate articulate and “low ego” people who want to grow as part of a team.

• We welcome diversity in all forms. We embrace strange and risky ideas and appreciate characters of all sorts.

• We hold each other accountable and work to a high standard. We take pride in the frequent, safe and graceful delivery of innovative and valuable features.

• We embrace open communication and challenge. We appreciate positivity and vigilance and strive for autonomy, trust, and personal and professional growth.

If this sounds interesting, we would love to hear from you! Please include whatever info you believe is relevant: resume, GitHub profile, code samples, blog posts and writing samples, links to personal projects, etc.

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 employees 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 Elastics 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.

The typical starting salary range for this role is:

$110,900—$175,500 USD

The typical starting salary range for this role in the select locations listed above is:

$133,200—$210,700 USD

Additional Information - We Take Care of Our People

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.

We strive to have parity of benefits across regions and while regulations differ from place to place, we believe taking care of our people is the right thing to do.

• 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