Principal Software Engineer - Agent Builder - Search

Job Description

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 Elastic is building Agent Builder, a conversational platform that connects production agents to real customer business data in Elasticsearch. As a Principal Engineer, you will set technical direction and drive the Kibana backend architecture for the agentic platform: streaming APIs, secure tool execution, session and memory persistence, retrieval and citations contracts, and evaluation telemetry. Your influence will extend beyond a single feature, shaping service boundaries, reliability posture, and standards that other solutions build on. What You Will Be Doing Own the architecture for chat back-end services (Node/TypeScript), defining service boundaries, data contracts, and scalability targets Lead cross-team design reviews ; author ADRs and RFCs that become reference standards for AI-chat and ingestion work. Build and harden event-driven pipelines that capture chat telemetry, evaluation traces, and LLM feedback loops; expose them via self-service analytics endpoints. Champion reliability —define error budgets, introduce testing strategy, and steer incident-response playbooks for conversational workloads. Mentor senior and Junior engineers; grow their system-design skills and foster a high-trust, low-ego culture. Partner with Product, Design, and Data Science to translate ambiguous goals (e.g., “multi-step reasoning with tool calling”) into incremental, testable action items. Represent Elastic in open-source AI communities (LangGraph/LangChain, MCP/A2A) through design proposals, blog posts, and conference talks. What You Bring We appreciate articulate and “low ego” people who want to grow as part of a team. 10 + years building distributed, production SaaS services—at least 5 years leading large-scale Node/TypeScript or similar back-end stacks. Deep expertise in distributed systems fundamentals —shard routing, consensus, eventual consistency, back-pressure, and circuit-breaker patterns. Demonstrated success designing high-throughput, low-latency APIs (gRPC / REST /

Required Skills