Elastic, the Search AI Company, enables everyone to find the answers they need in real time, using all their data, at scale — unleashing the potential of businesses and people. The Elastic Search AI Platform, used by more than 50% of the Fortune 500, brings together the precision of search and the intelligence of AI to enable everyone to accelerate the results that matter. By taking advantage of all structured and unstructured data — securing and protecting private information more effectively — Elastic’s complete, cloud-based solutions for search, security, and observability help organizations deliver on the promise of AI.

What is The Role:

We are looking for a Software Engineer to join our Foundational AI team. Our mission is to build the core AI experiences that power both our internal Field teams and our customer-facing support agents and chatbots. Built on Elasticsearch's vector search capabilities and Elastic Observability, our AI systems have a foundation most teams can only dream of—and you'll help us take full advantage of it.

We believe that we can fundamentally transform how our users interact with our platform. You will be a key part of this journey, moving beyond simple prompt engineering to build robust, agentic systems that interface with real-world data and APIs. We are looking for engineers who are excited by the challenge of making AI reliable, observable, and deeply integrated into our business workflows.

This posting reflects our current stack, not a forever decision. AI tooling evolves fast, and we're willing to evolve with it—when the juice is worth the squeeze. Bring your best thoughtful ideas, and let's build better together.

What You Will Be Doing:

• Architecting Agentic Workflows: Design and implement agentic workflows using LangChain and LangGraph, "Tool Use" (function calling) logic that allows LLMs to interact reliably with internal data sources and third-party APIs.
• Prompt Engineering & Orchestration: Craft, test, and version-control complex system prompts to ensure consistent, high-quality responses across multiple AI personas.
• Building Ingestion Pipelines: Own the data lifecycle for our AI features by building and maintaining scalable ingestion workflows using Apache Airflow.
• Advancing RAG Architectures on Elasticsearch: Leverage Elasticsearch's vector search and hybrid retrieval capabilities to optimize how we chunk, embed, and retrieve information to minimize hallucinations and maximize relevance.
• Ensuring AI Reliability: Implement observability and tracing Elastic APM and LangSmith to monitor agent performance, identify failure points in tool calls, and ensure security guardrails.

What You Bring:

You don't need to check every box—if you're strong in AI/LLM fundamentals and eager to learn the rest, we want to talk.

• AI & LLM Proficiency: Hands-on experience working with LLM APIs and a deep understanding of prompt engineering and model behavior. We currently use OpenAI, Anthropic, LangChain, and LangGraph. Experience with other providers (Google Vertex AI, AWS Bedrock, Cohere), open-source models (Llama, Mistral), or other orchestration frameworks (LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel, Haystack) works too.
• Backend Expertise: Strong proficiency in Python for AI logic and pipeline development, with a proven track record of writing clean, maintainable code.
• Language Versatility: Professional experience with an object-oriented language beyond Python (TypeScript, Java, C#, etc.) in TypeScript, with the ability to build and interface with modern web services beyond just script-based automation. We use TypeScript, but this is not a primary focus of the role.
• Data Engineering Fundamentals: Experience building and scheduling data pipelines at scale. We currently use Apache Airflow and Elasticsearch. Experience with other orchestration tools (Dagster, Prefect, Temporal), streaming systems (Kafka, Flink), or data warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks) works too.
• Search & Retrieval: Familiarity with search fundamentals and vector-based retrieval. We use Elasticsearch for lexical and vector search, along with many other features of the Elastic Stack.

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
• 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 a minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave

Different people approach problems differently. We need that. Elastic is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to creating an inclusive culture that celebrates different perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, ethnicity, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, disability status, or any other basis protected by federal, state or local law, ordinance or regulation.

We welcome individuals with disabilities and strive to create an accessible and inclusive experience for all individuals. To request an accommodation during the application or the recruiting process, please email candidate_accessibility@elastic.co. We will reply to your request within 24 business hours of submission.

Applicants have rights under Federal Employment Laws and can view the following posters linked below:

Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) Poster

Employee Polygraph Protection Act (EPPA) Poster

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