Chief Architect, Enterprise Search

At Elastic, we see endless possibility in a world of endless data. And we use the power of search to help people and organizations turn that possibility into results. Elastic is the leading platform for search-powered solutions. With solutions in Enterprise Search, Observability, and Security, we help improve customer and employee search experiences, keep critical applications running smoothly, and protect against cyber threats. Elastic enables organizations worldwide to use the power of Elastic, including Netflix, Uber, BBC, Microsoft, and thousands of others.

Elastic was built on a foundation of being free and open, which trickles down to how we work. We’re a distributed organization and have been from the beginning. Being distributed isn’t just a way of doing business—it’s a mentality that is at the core of our culture.

The Enterprise Search team focuses on a variety of use cases across the broad search market application search, website search, workplace/organizational search, ecommerce search, knowledge base search, and more. Broadly recognized as a Leader in the search space, Elastic is uniquely positioned to drive the next generation of technologies using a singular Stack, powered by Elasticsearch. That said, opportunities exist far beyond information retrieval: machine learning-powered relevance, simple and intuitive data ingestion with out-of-the-box data integrations with the world’s most widely adopted platforms, operational tooling for deploying search at scale and search experience delivery through modern frameworks and clients are an integral part of Elastic’s success. As the Enterprise Search Tech Lead, your day-to-day is invested in making all these pieces fit together in a coherent, intuitive and scalable engineering framework - quite an exciting journey!

The team is diverse and distributed across the world, and collaborates on a daily basis over GitHub, Zoom, and Slack. Thus, the ability to work within a distributed team is critical. You don’t always need to be the person with the answer or the person making the decisions, but instead should be able to guide discussions to help the team make decisions together.

About The Role

We are looking for a technology and engineering leader (Chief Architect) to help us realize our goals in the Enterprise Search team. The team is looking for someone with success building search experiences, search-oriented management tooling, and search technology that can help us evolve our Enterprise Search offering from a tech lead position. We seek a person who has made critical decisions in the evolution of a big product and platform over multiple years and releases and who can lead a large team with a coherent vision while making appropriate compromises along the way.

Some of the things you'll work on

• Leading the efforts to evolve the architecture of the Elastic Enterprise Search solution and the roadmap to implement it.
• Understanding and describing the whole arc of the user experience for each of the Enterprise Search solution use cases, and developing features that fit into that arc.
• Collaborating with the Cloud, Stack and other Solutions leads to align priorities and roadmaps, and make appropriate technology choices and compromises.
• Leading technical discussions and requirements analysis with partners and customers to drive alignment with customer needs.
• Reviewing and approving implementation designs for Enterprise Search.
• Communicating and evangelizing the Enterprise Search roadmap internally and with the community.
• Representing Elastic at conferences and networking events.
• Interviewing and hiring for the team.
• Mentoring engineers.

Requirements

• You have proven experience providing pragmatic technical leadership for a large group of engineers on complex and large-scale projects.
• You have a strong technical understanding of Ruby/Ruby on Rails or Java/JVM. We strongly believe that to properly build on top of a framework, you need to know how its internals work
• You are able to reason about complex software architectures, understanding the trade-offs, and the dynamics between its components across the full stack. You should be able to reason at a high level and zoom in on the details when needed. 
• Lead by example - you should be able to code when needed, review PRs and stay close to the team’s work. 
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, a great teammate with strong analytical, problem-solving, debugging, and troubleshooting skills.  Written skills are key to success in working with our distributed teams.
• You work with a high level of autonomy.
• Ego-free attitude — we are here for the success of the team and the company

Nice to have

• You have extensive experience in a technical leadership role with at least one of the pillars of enterprise search: application search, website search, organizational search, ecommerce search.
• Experience using or managing the Elastic Stack.
• Experience developing search products at scale.
• Experience running or significantly contributing to an open-source project.

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
• Double your charitable giving - We match up to $1500 (or local currency equivalent)
• 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 committed to diversity as well as inclusion. We are an equal opportunity employer and committed to the principles of affirmative action. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, or disability status or any other basis protected by federal, state or local law, ordinance or regulation. If you require any reasonable accessibility support, please email candidate_accessibility@elastic.co.

Applicants have rights under Federal Employment Laws, view posters linked below:
Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) Poster; Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Poster; and Employee Polygraph Protection Act (EPPA) Poster.

Please see here for our Privacy Statement.