Principal Software Engineer - Agent Builder - Search · Elastic, the Search AI Company

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 15:44:24 GMT
Engineering

Elastic, the Search AI Company · United Kingdom · remote

Elastic is building Agent Builder, a conversational platform that connects production agents to real customer business data in Elasticsearch. As a Principal Engineer, you will set technical direction and drive the Kibana backend architecture for the agentic platform: streaming APIs, secure tool execution, session and memory persistence, retrieval and citations contracts, and evaluation telemetry.

Your influence will extend beyond a single feature, shaping service boundaries, reliability posture, and standards that other solutions build on.

Responsibilities

Own the architecture for chat back-end services (Node/TypeScript), defining service boundaries, data contracts, and scalability targets

Lead cross-team design reviews; author ADRs and RFCs that become reference standards for AI-chat and ingestion work

Build and harden event-driven pipelines that capture chat telemetry, evaluation traces, and LLM feedback loops; expose them via self-service analytics endpoints

Champion reliability,define error budgets, introduce testing strategy, and steer incident-response playbooks for conversational workloads

Mentor senior and Junior engineers; grow their system-design skills and foster a high-trust, low-ego culture

Partner with Product, Design, and Data Science to translate ambiguous goals (e.g., “multi-step reasoning with tool calling”) into incremental, testable action items

Represent Elastic in open-source AI communities (LangGraph/LangChain, MCP/A2A) through design proposals, blog posts, and conference talks

What You Bring

10 + years building distributed, production SaaS services,at least 5 years leading large-scale Node/TypeScript or similar back-end stacks

Deep expertise in distributed systems fundamentals,shard routing, consensus, eventual consistency, back-pressure, and circuit-breaker patterns

Demonstrated success designing high-throughput, low-latency APIs (gRPC / REST / WebSocket),including streaming responses and resumable sessions

Hands-on experience with observability: OpenTelemetry, log/metric pipelines, synthetic checks, and SLO dashboards

Exposure to LLM tooling (LangChain/LangGraph, OpenAI function calls, vector-search, RAG orchestration) and enthusiasm for advancing GenAI architectures

Clear, persuasive written communication,your ADRs and RFCs set the standard others emulate

Benefits

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