Search - Search Inference - Software Engineer II id-6286

April 10, 2025

Elastic is a free and open search company that powers enterprise search, observability, and security solutions built on one technology stack that can be deployed anywhere. From finding documents to monitoring infrastructure to hunting for threats, Elastic makes data usable in real-time and at scale. Thousands of organizations worldwide, including Barclays, Cisco, eBay, Fairfax, ING, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, The Mayo Clinic, NASA, The New York Times, Wikipedia, and Verizon, use Elastic to power mission-critical systems. Founded in 2012, Elastic is a distributed company with Elasticians around the globe.

Other Jobs You May Be Interested In

The Search Inference team is responsible for bringing performant, ergonomic, and cost effective machine learning (ML) model inference to Search workflows. ML inference has become a crucial part of the modern search experience whether used for query understanding, semantic search, RAG, or any other GenAI use-case. Our goal is to simplify ML inference in Search workflows by focusing on large scale inference capabilities for embeddings and reranking models that are available across the Elasticsearch user base. As a team, we are a collaborative, cross-functional group with backgrounds in information retrieval, natural language processing, and distributed systems. We provide thought leadership across a variety of mediums including open code repositories, publishing blogs, and speaking at conferences. We focus on matching the expectations of our customers along the lines of throughput, latency, and cost.

What you will be doing

• You will be building product enhancements for search components with contributions to Elasticsearch and Kibana, as well as to distributed machine learning infrastructure.You will work closely with other software development engineers and site reliability engineers to ensure solutions are highly available, maintainable, scalable, secure, and meet compliance requirements.

• You will collaborate with teammates in a mostly text-based, asynchronous, remote-first team environment with occasional video calls and annual conferences.

• You’ll be hands-on with the team and codebase, reviewing work and providing constructive feedback.

• You will collaborate with the team on features, breaking them down into technical deliverables. You’ll act as an important and communicative part of an engaged and spirited team.

• You will create, audit, and fine tune key performance indicators (KPIs) of the search components built by the team to meet the relevance, performance, scalability, and security goals.

What you will bring

• 3+ years experience as a professional software developer with at least one object-oriented programming language.

• 3+ years experience contributing to large scale distributed systems.

• Experience with Docker/containerization and Kubernetes in production environments.

• Excellent practical judgment. You know how to prioritize, when to collaborate and ask for help, and when to be independent.

• Knowledge of modern machine learning, NLP and information retrieval are a big bonus.

• Measured and articulate written and spoken communication skills. You work well with others and can craft concise and expressive thoughts into correspondence: issues, investigations, documentation and onboarding material.

• An interest in learning new tools, languages, workflows and philosophies that can help you grow. You can function well in an environment that drives towards change.

Our Team Style

• We appreciate articulate and “low ego” people who want to grow as part of a team.

• We welcome diversity in all forms. We embrace strange and risky ideas and appreciate characters of all sorts.

• We hold each other accountable and work to a high standard. We take pride in the frequent, safe and graceful delivery of innovative and valuable features.

• We embrace open communication and challenge. We appreciate positivity and vigilance and strive for autonomy, trust, and personal and professional growth.

If this sounds interesting, we would love to hear from you! Please include whatever info you believe is relevant: resume, GitHub profile, code samples, blog posts and writing samples, links to personal projects, etc.

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.

Back to blog

Common Interview Questions And Answers

1. HOW DO YOU PLAN YOUR DAY?

This is what this question poses: When do you focus and start working seriously? What are the hours you work optimally? Are you a night owl? A morning bird? Remote teams can be made up of people working on different shifts and around the world, so you won't necessarily be stuck in the 9-5 schedule if it's not for you...

2. HOW DO YOU USE THE DIFFERENT COMMUNICATION TOOLS IN DIFFERENT SITUATIONS?

When you're working on a remote team, there's no way to chat in the hallway between meetings or catch up on the latest project during an office carpool. Therefore, virtual communication will be absolutely essential to get your work done...

3. WHAT IS "WORKING REMOTE" REALLY FOR YOU?

Many people want to work remotely because of the flexibility it allows. You can work anywhere and at any time of the day...

4. WHAT DO YOU NEED IN YOUR PHYSICAL WORKSPACE TO SUCCEED IN YOUR WORK?

With this question, companies are looking to see what equipment they may need to provide you with and to verify how aware you are of what remote working could mean for you physically and logistically...

5. HOW DO YOU PROCESS INFORMATION?

Several years ago, I was working in a team to plan a big event. My supervisor made us all work as a team before the big day. One of our activities has been to find out how each of us processes information...

6. HOW DO YOU MANAGE THE CALENDAR AND THE PROGRAM? WHICH APPLICATIONS / SYSTEM DO YOU USE?

Or you may receive even more specific questions, such as: What's on your calendar? Do you plan blocks of time to do certain types of work? Do you have an open calendar that everyone can see?...

7. HOW DO YOU ORGANIZE FILES, LINKS, AND TABS ON YOUR COMPUTER?

Just like your schedule, how you track files and other information is very important. After all, everything is digital!...

8. HOW TO PRIORITIZE WORK?

The day I watched Marie Forleo's film separating the important from the urgent, my life changed. Not all remote jobs start fast, but most of them are...

9. HOW DO YOU PREPARE FOR A MEETING AND PREPARE A MEETING? WHAT DO YOU SEE HAPPENING DURING THE MEETING?

Just as communication is essential when working remotely, so is organization. Because you won't have those opportunities in the elevator or a casual conversation in the lunchroom, you should take advantage of the little time you have in a video or phone conference...

10. HOW DO YOU USE TECHNOLOGY ON A DAILY BASIS, IN YOUR WORK AND FOR YOUR PLEASURE?

This is a great question because it shows your comfort level with technology, which is very important for a remote worker because you will be working with technology over time...

DISCLAIMER