[Hiring] Senior Java Software Engineer @Elastic

Role Description

We are on the lookout for a Senior Java Developer to join our Elasticsearch team and drive our work on the Inference API in Elasticsearch. The Elasticsearch Inference API is the integration layer between Elasticsearch and external machine learning services including Elastic's own Elastic Inference Service (EIS), third-party providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, Cohere, Google), and self-hosted models. It powers features like semantic search, reranking, and generative AI across Elastic Cloud and in hosted environments.

You'll maintain and develop the plugin framework and REST API with your work spanning:

• Protocol design
• Streaming
• Async execution
• Billing integration
• Tight collaboration with the wider inference team and the Kibana team

Qualifications

• 5+ years of production Java experience, with experience contributing to a large, established Java codebase.
• Knowledge of core Java and the standard library of data structures and concurrency constructs, as well as newer language features.
• Experience crafting ergonomic APIs and the ability to reason through tradeoffs.
• Experience with low-level Java such as concurrency, parallelism, classloaders, etc.
• Proven track record of using AI to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimize code.
• Ability to collaborate across functions and teams and seamlessly transition between different projects, codebases, or teams based on business priorities.
• Ability to work autonomously, drive decisions and results in a distributed team by leveraging asynchronous, direct, and transparent communication.

Requirements

• Build and maintain integrations with internal systems and external inference providers, including schema negotiation, streaming (SSE), and error normalization.
• Contribute to the inference plugin's internal architecture: task settings, chunking strategies, rate limiting, and provider-level configuration.
• Review open source contributions to the codebase and work with third party engineers to ensure their contributions meet our technology standards.
• Participate in on-call rotation for inference-related incidents.
• Write thorough tests: unit tests using ESTestCase, YAML-based REST integration tests, and rolling-upgrade tests.

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.