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
What is the Role As a Principal Search Architect , you will serve as the elite technical authority and visionary leader helping our largest enterprise customers unlock the full potential of Elasticsearch . Acting as a strategic, trusted advisor to CTOs and Enterprise Architecture teams, you will design, govern, and scale massive, complex Elasticsearch cluster topologies that transform application search performance, data retrieval infrastructure, and AI-powered semantic search capabilities
You will bridge the gap between business strategy and cutting-edge distributed systems engineering, collaborating directly with Elastic’s global Professional Services leadership, Core Engineering, Product Management, and Sales executives. In this high-impact role, you will shape the future of enterprise deployments by driving regional architectural standards, leading critical cluster migrations, and mentoring both Fortune 500 engineering teams and internal Elastic technical staff
What You Will Be Doing Elasticsearch Core Architecture: Translate highly complex business requirements into resilient, next-generation enterprise retrieval architectures built natively on distributed Elasticsearch environments
Cluster Governance & Design: Lead the overarching technical strategy and design authority for high-stakes customer engagements—from initial node blueprinting and capacity planning to custom mappings, shard strategy, Index Lifecycle Management (ILM), and cross-cluster replication (CCR/CCS)
Advanced Vector Search & AI Engineering: Design and operationalize cutting-edge semantic search architectures utilizing Elasticsearch’s native vector database capabilities, including kNN, Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN), ELSER (Elastic Learned Sparse Encoder), hybrid retrieval, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines
Performance Tuning & Optimization: Profile, benchmark, and tune distributed search and indexing performance for ultra-high-QPS environments with aggressive sub-second SLAs, optimizing Apache Lucene segment merging, caching layers, and heap/garbage collection configurations