Senior Core Technologies Engineer
Senior engineer responsible for scaling Elasticsearch and other core backend technologies, improving datastore reliability and observability, and delivering infrastructure and application improvements. The role requires 5+ years of production engineering experience and strong distributed-systems expertise.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Own high-impact work on Elasticsearch at scale, including index design, shard and partitioning strategy, cluster health, performance tuning, safe migrations, and operational excellence.
- Collaborate with domain experts to shape technical direction and infrastructure as the platform grows.
- Own aspects of infrastructure, including writing application code, automating systems, improving observability, and tuning production, test, and development datastores.
- Contribute to ideation, prototyping, design, and implementation across the software development lifecycle.
- Balance hands-on development with strategic work and enablement.
- Participate in hiring, mentoring, and career development for other engineers.
- Raise technical standards for performance, reliability, and operational excellence.
Requirements
- 5+ years of experience in a production environment, including contributions to distributed-systems design and architecture.
- Excellent pragmatic engineering skills.
- Strong experience with at least one major production datastore or search system; Elasticsearch is especially relevant.
- Experience with Elasticsearch index and mapping design, cluster operations, scaling patterns, performance tuning, or migrations.
- Expertise in backend technologies such as MySQL, Memcached, and Linux.
- Experience scaling a SaaS product is preferred.
- Demonstrated impact on products or engineering teams.
- Proficiency with unit testing, object-oriented design, data structures, code reviews, design documentation, and observability tooling.
- Understanding of modern web applications and distributed systems, with the ability to articulate technical challenges and solutions.
- Experience serving as a technical lead for large, multiquarter projects and programs, including roadmap definition.
- Ability to learn quickly, iterate, unblock yourself, and persist until the right problem is solved.
Benefits and Compensation
- Competitive salary and equity in a fast-growing startup.
- Lunch provided on weekdays, snacks, and a fully stocked kitchen.
- Regular compensation reviews.
- Unlimited access to Claude Code and other AI tools.
- Pension scheme with matching contributions up to 4%.
- Life assurance and comprehensive health and dental insurance for employees and dependents.
- Flexible paid time off.
- Paid maternity leave and six weeks of paternity leave.
- Cycle-to-Work Scheme and secure bike storage.
- MacBooks are standard; Windows devices are available for certain roles.
- Hybrid working policy requiring at least three days per week in the office.
Skills
Elasticsearch, MySQL, Memcached, Linux, Distributed Systems, Database Sharding, Index Design, Observability, Ruby on Rails, Object-Oriented Design, Data Structures, Unit Testing, Continuous Deployment, Infrastructure Automation, Performance Tuning
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