Is Elastic a remote company?

Yes. Elastic is "distributed by intention" — remote, hybrid, and in-person roles are available so you can work virtually or from one of its global offices. The majority of currently open roles (about 91%) are tagged remote, and Elasticians work across more than 40 countries.

Where does Elastic hire?

Elastic hires in the countries where it has legal entities rather than "anywhere in the world." Recent openings span the United States (its largest hiring geography), the United Kingdom, Canada, Spain, India, the Netherlands, Japan, and 15+ other countries across EMEA, the Americas, and APJ. Eligibility is set role by role in each job posting.

What benefits does Elastic offer?

Benefits include health coverage for you and your family, a minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave, generous paid time off, a 401(k) with dollar-for-dollar matching up to 6% of eligible earnings (US), equity (RSUs) plus an employee stock purchase plan, a reimbursement to set up your remote workspace when you join and again after every five years, 40 hours of paid volunteer time each year, and donation matching up to US$2,000. Specific benefits vary by region.

Does Elastic share salary ranges?

US job postings include explicit salary bands (for example, "$106,900–$169,100 USD"), driven by Greenhouse and US pay-transparency laws, with uplifts for select higher-cost metros. Compensation is geo-based rather than global-parity, and roles are also eligible for Elastic's equity program. Elastic states pay is "based on the work you do here and not your previous salary."

What is Elastic's interview process like?

The process generally runs: application, a 30-minute recruiter screen, department interviews (45–90 minutes), an optional panel presentation, a technical assessment for some roles (60–90 minutes), then a decision and onboarding. Most interviews are conducted virtually, though some may be held on-site.

Who is Elastic a good fit for?

Elastic suits people who thrive in a distributed, written-first culture and want to build search, observability, and security products on the Elastic Search AI Platform. Its published "Source Code" values — like "come as you are" and "distributed by intention" — emphasize flexibility, autonomy across time zones, and inclusion across a workforce representing more than 100 nationalities.

Principal Software Engineer

Elastic

Remote

Job Description

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

The enterprise software landscape is undergoing a structural shift. AI-assisted development has dropped the cost and time required to build custom internal tools by more than half. Retool's 2026 State of Internal Software report found that 35% of enterprises have already replaced SaaS tools with purpose-built software, and 78% plan to build more in the year ahead. The calculus has changed: what previously required a six-figure vendor contract and a year-long implementation is now a small engineering team and a few focused sprints.

Elastic is at the beginning of this journey. We operate the Elastic Stack — Elasticsearch, Kibana, Elastic ML, and a growing set of AI-native capabilities — at production scale for thousands of customers. And we are increasingly building on our own platform internally: replacing expensive SaaS tools with Elastic-native systems that are faster, more intelligent, and owned entirely by us.

We are looking for a Principal Engineer to join our Information Technology team to be part of this effort. This is not a support role or a tools administrator position. It is a senior engineering role for someone who can look at a $500,000 annual SaaS contract and ask: 'Could we build a better version of this on Elasticsearch in twelve weeks?' — and then go do it.

This is a rare opportunity to do original product engineering inside an IT organization, working with a platform that most engineers only get to use as a customer — and to build systems that directly shape how a public company operates.

What You Will Be Doing

Lead strategic build-vs-buy Engineering

You will work with IT leadership, Finance, and Engineering to evaluate Elastic's internal SaaS portfolio and identify where custom-built systems — backed by Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Elastic's AI capabilities — deliver better value than continued vendor contracts. You will own the architecture, engineering systems, build plan, and delivery of the highest-priority replacements.

Design and build Elastic-native internal platforms

The project portfolio spans four areas where the build-vs-buy shift is most compelling:

Platform productivity tools — internal developer portals, knowledge search layers, engineering onboarding systems, and workspace tooling that unifies disparate SaaS tools into a single Elasticsearch-backed search and intelligence layer.
FinOps and AI cost governance — a consolidated cost visibility and anomaly detection system across Elastic's AI providers (Anthropic, OpenAI Codex, GitHub Copilot, Google Gemini) and cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), replacing commercial FinOps SaaS with an Elastic ML-powered alternative.
IT service management — evaluating and building replacements for commercially purchased SaaS products including incident management, knowledge base search, internal developer portal, and SIEM-correlated security workflows, using Elastic Observability and Elastic Security as the backbone.
Enterprise efficiency systems — custom tooling that reduces manual process overhead across IT, Finance, HR, and Operations, using the LLM Gateway, RAG pipelines, and Elasticsearch as the data and intelligence layer.

Set the engineering standard

As a Principal Engineer, you will establish and own the architectural standards, design patterns, and engineering practices for all IT platform engineering work. You will define how internal systems are built — data models, API design, observability, cost governance, security posture — and be the technical authority others look to when decisions get hard.

Collaborate across the company

You will partner closely with Elastic's IT infrastructure team, the Security organization (Elastic Security is your SIEM backbone), the Platform Engineering team, and Finance. You will engage with tool owners across the company to understand requirements, challenge assumptions about what needs to be bought versus built and ensure that the systems you build actually get used.

Dogfood and validate Elastic's own products

A significant part of the role is running Elastic's own technology in the most demanding possible context: as the engineer responsible for the internal systems that the company depends on every day. Every system you build is a reference architecture. Every insight you generate about what works and what doesn't feed directly into Elastic's product and go-to-market strategy.

What You Bring

15+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 years as a principal engineer.
Deep, hands-on expertise with Elasticsearch — data modelling, query design, aggregations, performance tuning, and production operations. This is not a role for someone who has read the documentation; we need someone who has run Elasticsearch at scale and can debug it in production.
Strong full-stack engineering capability: you can build and own a system end-to-end, from Logstash ingest pipelines to Kibana dashboards to a React frontend, without needing to hand off each layer to a different team.
Proven track record of building and shipping commercial software or platform systems — not just maintaining existing ones. We want to see examples of systems you originated and delivered.
Architectural judgment: the ability to scope a problem correctly, choose the right components, and make the call on when to build versus integrate versus buy. You have opinions about this, and you can defend them with data.
Strong written communication. You will write architecture decision records, engineering standards documents, and build-vs-buy analyses. Your writing needs to be clear and persuasive to both engineering and non-engineering audiences.

Bonus Points

Prior experience building on the Elastic Stack beyond basic logging — Elastic ML, ELSER semantic search, vector search, Kibana Canvas, Watcher, or Elastic Security.
Experience with FinOps practices: cloud cost management, LLM API cost attribution, or building cost visibility tooling.
Familiarity with Information Technology managed systems — not necessarily Salesforce or ServiceNow expertise, but an understanding of the domain problems these tools solve.
Experience working in a hypergrowth or post-IPO technology company where engineering rigor and business speed have to coexist.
Experience with LLM integration patterns: RAG pipelines, prompt engineering for enterprise use cases, LLM gateway design, or AI-powered workflow automation.
Contributions to internal developer experience, platform engineering, or engineering productivity tooling.

Compensation for this role is in the form of base salary. This role does not have a variable compensation component.

The typical starting salary range for new hires in this role is listed below. In select locations (including Seattle WA, Los Angeles CA, the San Francisco Bay Area CA, and the New York City Metro Area), an alternate range may apply as specified below.

These ranges represent the lowest to highest salary we reasonably and in good faith believe we would pay for this role at the time of this posting. We may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range, and the ranges may be modified in the future.

An employee's position within the salary range will be based on several factors including, but not limited to, relevant education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, geographic location, performance, and business or organizational needs.

Elastic believes that employees should have the opportunity to share in the value that we create together for our shareholders. Therefore, in addition to cash compensation, this role is currently eligible to participate in Elastic's stock program. Our total rewards package also includes a company-matched 401k with dollar-for-dollar matching up to 6% of eligible earnings, along with a range of other benefits offered with a holistic emphasis on employee well-being.

The typical starting salary range for this role is:

$135,700—$214,700 USD

The typical starting salary range for this role in the select locations listed above is:

$163,100—$258,100 USD

Additional Information - We Take Care of Our People

As a distributed company, diversity drives our identity. Whether you’re looking to launch a new career or grow an existing one, Elastic is the type of company where you can balance great work with great life. Your age is only a number. It doesn’t matter if you’re just out of college or your children are; we need you for what you can do.

We strive to have parity of benefits across regions and while regulations differ from place to place, we believe taking care of our people is the right thing to do.

Competitive pay based on the work you do here and not your previous salary
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
Increase your impact - 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
Embracing parenthood with minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave

Different people approach problems differently. We need that. Elastic is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to creating an inclusive culture that celebrates different perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, ethnicity, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, disability status, or any other basis protected by federal, state or local law, ordinance or regulation.

We welcome individuals with disabilities and strive to create an accessible and inclusive experience for all individuals. To request an accommodation during the application or the recruiting process, please email candidate_accessibility@elastic.co. We will reply to your request within 24 business hours of submission.

Applicants have rights under Federal Employment Laws, view posters linked below: Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) Poster; Pay Transparency Nondiscrimination Provision Poster; Employee Polygraph Protection Act (EPPA) Poster and Know Your Rights (Poster)

Elasticsearch develops and distributes technology and information that is subject to U.S. and other countries’ export controls and licensing requirements for individuals who are located in or are nationals of the following sanctioned countries and regions: Belarus, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, or Russia, including the Ukrainian territories annexed by Russia (The Crimea region of Ukraine, The Donetsk People's Republic (DNR), The Luhansk People's Republic (LNR), Kherson or Zaporizhzhia). If you are located in or are a national of one of the listed countries or regions, an export license may be required as a condition of your employment in this role. Please note that national origin and/or nationality do not affect eligibility for employment with Elastic.

Please see here for our Privacy Statement.

Benefits & Perks

Health & Wellness

Health Insurance

Elastic offers health coverage for employees and their families across many locations, with US plans through Anthem or Kaiser fully covered.

Dental Insurance

Dental coverage is provided through Delta Dental as part of Elastic's US health package.

Vision Insurance

Vision coverage is provided through VSP as part of Elastic's US health package.

Health Savings Account (HSA)

Elastic offers a Health Savings Account paired with high-deductible health plan options for US employees.

Flexible Spending Account (FSA)

Pre-tax flexible spending account for healthcare and dependent care expenses, available to US employees.

Life Insurance

Employer-paid life insurance and AD&D coverage at 2x base salary up to $500,000 for US employees.

Disability Insurance

Short-term disability covers 60% of weekly earnings up to $2,500/week and long-term disability covers 60% of monthly earnings up to $12,500/month for US employees.

Mental Health Benefits

Elastic provides emotional support services alongside health coverage as part of its Health and Well-being benefits.

Employee Assistance Program

Confidential employee assistance program services are available for personal and work challenges, including an Elastic-provided employee assistance fund.

Financial

401(k) / Retirement Plan

Elastic offers a 401(k) retirement plan for US employees, with regional retirement plans available in other locations.

401(k) Match

Elastic provides dollar-for-dollar 401(k) matching up to 6% of eligible earnings for US employees.

Equity / RSUs

Every Elastic employee receives RSU grants with default four-year vesting at 25% annually.

Employee Stock Purchase Plan

Employees can purchase Elastic (NYSE: ESTC) stock at a discount through the company's employee stock purchase plan.

Time Off

PTO / Vacation

Elastic provides 20 vacation days a year for US employees and encourages employees to actually use them.

Sick Days

Paid sick days are provided separate from vacation, at 5 days a year for US employees.

Paid Holidays

Elastic observes paid company holidays as part of its time-off package.

Bereavement Leave

Paid bereavement leave is available following the death of a family member or loved one.

Remote & Equipment

Home Office Stipend

Elastic reimburses employees to set up their remote workspace when they join and again after every five years of tenure.

Company Equipment

Elastic provides a custom work station as part of the standard new-hire equipment package.

Family & Care

Parental Leave

A published minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave, stated in every job posting alongside family-formation and caregiving benefits. Specific terms vary by region and build on that floor.

Adoption Leave

Elastic provides adoption assistance as part of its family formation benefits.

Fertility Benefits

Family-formation benefits are offered alongside parental and caregiving leave. Elastic does not publish a dollar amount, and terms vary by region.

Caregiver Policy

Professional Growth

Learning & Development Budget

Elastic offers learning and development programs to support skill building and career growth.

Culture & Perks

Volunteer Time Off

Employees receive up to 40 paid hours each year to volunteer with organizations they care about.

Charity Matching

Elastic matches employee charitable donations up to US$2,000 per year, or the local currency equivalent.

Employee Resource Groups

Elastician Resource Groups connect employees across identities and interests as part of Elastic's global community.