Staff Software Engineer (Elasticsearch)

TL;DR

Staff Software Engineer (Elasticsearch/JVM): Building and optimizing a multi-tenant data platform for high-volume ingestion and routing of user and event data with an accent on Elasticsearch strategy, system reliability, and performance. Focus on designing distributed systems, enforcing platform contracts, and managing large-scale multi-tenant clusters.

Location: Must be based in the US (Remote or Hybrid in Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Denver, New York, or San Francisco)

Salary: $156,000 – $242,000

Company

AI-powered customer engagement platform helping brands create individualized experiences at scale.

What you will do

• Own and evolve core Data In Flight services focusing on reliability, performance, and cost.
• Lead Elasticsearch strategy, including index design, shard strategy, and safeguards for shared clusters.
• Design and enforce platform contracts (APIs, data models, SLAs) to enable product team velocity.
• Collaborate across data and application teams on Elasticsearch upgrades, resharding, and event retention.
• Provide senior technical leadership during incidents and mentor engineers on distributed systems and data modeling.

Requirements

• Must be based in the United States.
• Production experience with Elasticsearch, including schema design for high-cardinality multi-tenant workloads and cluster operations.
• Experience building multi-tenant platforms with rate limits, quotas, and noisy-neighbor protections.
• Strong background in JVM-based services (Scala/Java) and event-driven or streaming architectures.
• Proven track record of leading cross-team projects and producing clear technical documentation (RFCs, design docs).

Nice to have

• Experience with Scala and the Play framework.
• Prior work on core user data platforms, such as identity stores or CDP-like systems.
• Experience in MarTech, AdTech, or other high-volume, low-latency data domains.
• Exposure to FinOps and infrastructure cost optimization in data-heavy systems.

Culture & Benefits

• Competitive salary, meaningful equity, and 401(k) plan.
• Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, and life insurance.
• Flexible PTO and Balance Days (additional paid holidays).
• Paid Sabbatical.
• Monthly allowances for wellness and professional development.