[Remote] Senior Engineer, Competitive Benchmarking & Performance
Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Elastic is hiring a Senior Engineer to lead competitive benchmarking initiatives for Elasticsearch. The role builds reproducible benchmark workloads and tools, investigates performance across competing systems, and works with engineering, product, and content partners to guide improvements and publish technical findings.
Responsibilities
- Own prioritized competitive benchmarking initiatives across search, vector and hybrid retrieval, and analytical and observability workloads
- Build and maintain automated benchmark harnesses, datasets, query sets, and load profiles that reflect real-world usage, including concurrent ingestion and querying
- Design fair comparisons with documented system versions, configurations, tuning decisions, resource budgets, and functional differences
- Evaluate latency distributions, throughput, resource consumption, and cost efficiency. For retrieval workloads, measure performance at comparable recall or relevance targets
- Adapt and extend workload-appropriate tools such as Elasticsearch Rally, ClickBench, and vector search benchmark frameworks
- Investigate performance differences using profiling, system metrics, and controlled experiments; collaborate with engineering teams to identify causes and validate improvements
- Evaluate relevant self-managed and managed cloud deployments, including serverless offerings, accounting for scaling behavior and service constraints
- Work with engineering and technical content partners to publish reproducible benchmark artifacts and clear technical reports that explain methodology, findings, limitations, and tradeoffs
- Partner with engineering and product management to prioritize benchmark coverage and translate findings into actionable product improvements
Skills
- Solid software engineering skills, with experience building maintainable automation and analysis tools in Python or another relevant programming language
- Hands-on experience evaluating and diagnosing performance in distributed systems, databases, or search infrastructure
- Depth in at least one relevant area (search, vector retrieval, analytical databases, or observability systems) and the ability to learn unfamiliar systems
- Experience designing representative datasets and workloads, including query patterns, concurrency, and ingestion behavior
- Sound experimental judgment, including repeated measurements, variability analysis, warm-up and cache effects, and the distinction between meaningful changes and measurement noise
- Experience building reproducible test environments and documenting configurations, procedures, and results
- Clear technical writing and communication skills, with the ability to explain complex findings and their limitations
- Solid collaboration skills and the ability to turn performance evidence into applicable engineering recommendations
- Experience with Elasticsearch, Lucene, Rally, ClickBench, or vector search benchmark frameworks
- Experience measuring retrieval quality alongside latency, throughput, and resource usage
- Familiarity with cloud performance and cost analysis, including autoscaling and serverless systems
- Public technical writing, open-source contributions, or published benchmark studies
Benefits
- Eligible to participate in Elastic's stock program.
- Company-matched 401k with dollar-for-dollar matching up to 6% of eligible earnings.
- 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.
- 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.
- Minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave.
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