[Hiring] Principal Software Engineer - Agent Builder - Search @Elastic

Role Description

Elastic is building Agent Builder, a conversational platform that connects production agents to real customer business data in Elasticsearch. As a Principal Engineer, you will set technical direction and drive the Kibana backend architecture for the agentic platform:

• Streaming APIs
• Secure tool execution
• Session and memory persistence
• Retrieval and citations contracts
• Evaluation telemetry

Your influence will extend beyond a single feature, shaping service boundaries, reliability posture, and standards that other solutions build on.

What You Will Be Doing

• Own the architecture for chat back-end services (Node/TypeScript), defining service boundaries, data contracts, and scalability targets.
• Lead cross-team design reviews; author ADRs and RFCs that become reference standards for AI-chat and ingestion work.
• Build and harden event-driven pipelines that capture chat telemetry, evaluation traces, and LLM feedback loops; expose them via self-service analytics endpoints.
• Champion reliability—define error budgets, introduce testing strategy, and steer incident-response playbooks for conversational workloads.
• Mentor senior and junior engineers; grow their system-design skills and foster a high-trust, low-ego culture.
• Partner with Product, Design, and Data Science to translate ambiguous goals (e.g., “multi-step reasoning with tool calling”) into incremental, testable action items.
• Represent Elastic in open-source AI communities (LangGraph/LangChain, MCP/A2A) through design proposals, blog posts, and conference talks.

Qualifications

• 10+ years building distributed, production SaaS services—at least 5 years leading large-scale Node/TypeScript or similar back-end stacks.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems fundamentals—shard routing, consensus, eventual consistency, back-pressure, and circuit-breaker patterns.
• Demonstrated success designing high-throughput, low-latency APIs (gRPC / REST / WebSocket)—including streaming responses and resumable sessions.
• Hands-on experience with observability: OpenTelemetry, log/metric pipelines, synthetic checks, and SLO dashboards.
• Exposure to LLM tooling (LangChain/LangGraph, OpenAI function calls, vector-search, RAG orchestration) and enthusiasm for advancing GenAI architectures.
• Clear, persuasive written communication—your ADRs and RFCs set the standard others emulate.
• Nice-to-have: contribution history to Kibana or other large SPAs; ability to prototype front-end dashboards when it unblocks back-end work.

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 a minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave.