Director of Software Engineering - Distributed Systems, Serverless - Elasticsearch
Elastic · United States
About this role
## Director of Software Engineering — Distributed Systems (Serverless, Elasticsearch) ### About Elastic Elastic, the Search AI Company, helps people find answers in real time using all their data at scale. The Elastic Search AI Platform (used by 50%+ of the Fortune 500) combines search precision with AI intelligence to accelerate the results that matter—across cloud-based solutions for search, security, and observability. ### The Role Elastic is looking for a **Director of Software Engineering** to lead the **Elasticsearch Distributed Systems** organization. This team focuses on how Elasticsearch delivers **scale, performance, and resilience**, especially in the context of **Serverless Elasticsearch**. You will lead an organization of approximately **40 engineers and managers**, tackling deep distributed systems challenges that enable Elasticsearch to excel at scale. Your customers include every Elasticsearch user and the solution teams building on Elasticsearch. Elastic is a **distributed company by intention**, with teams collaborating daily across email, GitHub, Zoom, and Slack—so the ability to lead a distributed team is critical. ### What You Will Be Doing - Develop and execute a **long-term engineering strategy** for Elasticsearch distributed systems, aligning technical priorities with product direction and business objectives. - Drive improvements in **performance, scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency**, including foundational capabilities supporting **Serverless Elasticsearch**. - Lead the evolution of Elasticsearch’s core distributed architecture: **cluster coordination, data allocation, indexing, replication, and recovery**. - Provide technical leadership and oversight for complex initiatives, helping engineering managers and technical leaders navigate architectural decisions and competing priorities. - Own engineering outcomes across your organization, balancing technical complexity, customer impact, reliability, operational requirements, and long-term maintainability. - Lead, mentor, hire, and develop engineering managers and senior technical leaders; establish high performance standards and build a strong pipeline of future leaders. - Own organizational planning, staffing, and resource allocation to ensure teams have the capabilities and support needed. - Partner with Product Management, engineering leaders, and other teams across Elastic to deliver complex initiatives spanning multiple engineering organizations. - Serve as a senior escalation point for critical technical and operational challenges, working with Engineering, Support, and SRE to drive resolution. - Communicate engineering strategy, organizational priorities, and progress to senior executives. - Run consistent performance management (promotions, development plans, and managing underperformance through resolution). ### What You Bring - Proven experience leading **large-scale engineering organizations**, including managing engineering managers and developing senior technical leaders. - Hands-on software engineering experience with strong computer science fundamentals and substantial technical depth in **distributed systems**. - Experience designing, building, or operating complex large-scale distributed systems (ideally involving **database engines, distributed storage, or large-scale data processing**). - Strong understanding of distributed systems concepts: **concurrency, consistency, replication, fault tolerance, recovery, and performance opti
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