Principal Software Engineer - Agent Builder for Workplace AI

About the Role

We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer - Agent Builder to join Elastic, the Search AI Company. This remote position allows you to leverage your expertise in building distributed, production SaaS services while working with a team that values diversity and innovation. You will play a crucial role in shaping the future of our conversational platform, which connects production agents to real customer business data in Elasticsearch.

What You'll Do

• Own the architecture for chat back-end services using Node and TypeScript, defining service boundaries and data contracts.
• Lead cross-team design reviews and author architectural decision records (ADRs) and requests for comments (RFCs) that set the standard for AI-chat and ingestion work.
• Build and harden event-driven pipelines that capture chat telemetry, evaluation traces, and feedback loops for large language models (LLMs).
• Champion reliability by defining error budgets and steering incident-response playbooks for conversational workloads.
• Mentor senior and junior engineers, fostering a high-trust, low-ego culture while enhancing their system-design skills.
• Collaborate with Product, Design, and Data Science teams to translate ambiguous goals into actionable items.
• Represent Elastic in open-source AI communities through design proposals, blog posts, and conference talks.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in building distributed, production SaaS services, with at least 5 years in a leadership role using Node/TypeScript or similar back-end stacks.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems fundamentals, including shard routing, consensus, and circuit-breaker patterns.
• Experience designing high-throughput, low-latency APIs (gRPC, REST, WebSocket) with streaming responses.
• Hands-on experience with observability tools such as OpenTelemetry and synthetic checks.
• Exposure to LLM tooling and a passion for advancing GenAI architectures.
• Strong written communication skills, with the ability to create clear ADRs and RFCs.

Nice to Have

• Contribution history to Kibana or other large single-page applications (SPAs).
• Ability to prototype front-end dashboards when it unblocks back-end work.

What We Offer

• Competitive pay based on your contributions, not your previous salary.
• Health coverage for you and your family in many locations.
• Flexible work locations and schedules.
• Generous vacation days each year.
• Financial matching for donations and volunteer projects.
• A minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave.

Join us as a Principal Software Engineer - Agent Builder and help shape the future of AI at Elastic. If you are passionate about technology and want to make a difference, we would love to hear from you!