Elasticsearch Platform Engineer

About the Company

Our mission is to maximize the value that exists in the world by enabling information, products, and opportunities to flow more freely. Through technology, we help millions of users discover and access what matters to them while creating systems that operate reliably at enormous scale.

To support this mission, our infrastructure organization provides internal engineering teams with highly available, self-service platforms that allow them to move quickly without needing to manage complex operational systems themselves.

Team Overview

The Search Infrastructure team owns the technology platform powering search experiences across the business.

Rather than building customer-facing search features directly, the team operates and evolves the foundational search ecosystem used by multiple product organizations. Engineers on the team manage large-scale Elasticsearch environments, supporting services, and performance-critical infrastructure that process hundreds of millions of searchable records and sustain significant query throughput.

The team functions as both platform operators and search technology specialists, partnering closely with product and search engineering teams to deliver reliable, scalable search capabilities.

The Opportunity

We are looking for a senior engineer who enjoys solving large-scale infrastructure problems and has deep expertise operating search technologies in production.

This role combines hands-on ownership of distributed search systems with broader platform engineering responsibilities. You will play a key role in managing critical Elasticsearch environments, improving system reliability, optimizing performance, supporting internal users, and influencing infrastructure strategy across the organization.

You will be expected to take ownership of technical decisions from design through operations, including long-term planning, incident management, and platform evolution.

What You'll Be Responsible For

Search Platform Ownership

• Manage production Elasticsearch clusters supporting business-critical workloads.
• Design and execute cluster provisioning, scaling, lifecycle management, and upgrade strategies.
• Define and optimize shard allocation, replication models, indexing approaches, and capacity planning.
• Maintain healthy cluster performance as data volumes and query traffic grow.

Reliability & Operations

• Participate in the team's on-call rotation after onboarding.
• Lead incident response activities and technical investigations.
• Drive root-cause analysis and permanent corrective actions following production events.
• Improve operational practices through automation and tooling.

Performance Engineering

• Analyze and optimize search latency and platform efficiency.
• Improve JVM behavior, memory utilization, cluster stability, and resource consumption.
• Troubleshoot indexing and query-performance issues across the search stack.
• Contribute to improvements in APIs and search services consumed by internal engineering teams.

Platform Collaboration

• Partner with broader infrastructure teams working on Kubernetes and cloud platform initiatives.
• Review and contribute to Terraform-based infrastructure changes.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to engineers across multiple teams.
• Help establish engineering standards and best practices.

Technical Challenges You'll Tackle

• Operating mission-critical search services with strict reliability and latency requirements.
• Supporting large-scale clusters containing hundreds of millions of indexed documents.
• Balancing immediate operational needs with longer-term platform modernization initiatives.
• Evaluating emerging search technologies, including vector search solutions.
• Working across infrastructure and product domains to align technical constraints with business requirements.
• Managing end-to-end ownership of the search stack, from cluster architecture and JVM tuning to query-path optimization.

Required Qualifications

Technical Experience

• Extensive experience operating distributed systems in large-scale production environments.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems concepts including:
• Replication
• Consistency models
• Failure recovery
• Capacity management
• Scalability design
• Significant hands-on ownership of Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, or another Lucene-based search platform in production.

Search Infrastructure Expertise

Demonstrated experience with:

• Cluster architecture and administration
• Capacity planning and growth management
• Index lifecycle management
• Sharding and replication strategies
• JVM tuning and memory optimization
• Search performance troubleshooting
• Operational support and system reliability

Software Engineering

• Strong software development skills in:
• Go
• Java
• or both

Ownership

• Proven ability to own a technical domain end-to-end, including:
• Architecture
• Implementation
• Operational support
• Incident management
• Strategic roadmap development

Preferred Qualifications

Experience in one or more of the following areas:

• Lucene internals
• Advanced JVM performance engineering
• Vector search technologies
• Kubernetes operations (GKE, EKS, AKS)
• Kubernetes cluster upgrades and production troubleshooting
• Terraform at enterprise scale
• CI/CD systems such as GitHub Actions or Jenkins
• Search platforms supporting marketplace, e-commerce, or consumer internet products
• High-scale data services environments

Language Requirements

• English: Business level
• Japanese: Not required