Principal Software Engineer (Networking) - Platform

Company: Elastic
Location: Washington
Posted on: March 24, 2026

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. As part of the Platform Engineering department, the Traffic team is crafting, building, and improving the multi-cloud platform at scale for Elastic Cloud Hosted and Serverless. We grow and mature our distributed network services and solutions for multiple cloud service provider platforms. We are built on Kubernetes, Go/Scala, and custom orchestration architectures. In your daily life with us, you will participate in coding, innovating technical designs, crafting solutions, improving resilience, and prioritizing security, bug fixes, and features. For example, Debugging Azure Networking for Elastic Cloud Serverless is part of our efforts, and we want your experience to contribute to a truly exceptional customer experience RESPONSIBILITIES • Taking an engineering approach in leading technical initiatives for automating network engineering efforts to guarantee the reliability of the global Elastic infrastructure. • Growing our global Platform infrastructure to meet the increasing scaling demands by developing and maintaining software, codebases, tooling and automations. • Collaborating in an environment with an inclusive approach, and focusing on operational perfection which uplifts others. • Preventing repeated customer impact in response to major incidents and prioritised problem management. Our on call rotation is spread well, and we address complex customer concerns too QUALIFICATIONS • 10 years in Software Engineering with product success in delivering Cloud network solutions. You collaborate with engineers as an authority in identifying, implementing and delivering solutions. Experience in public cloud, Go and managed Kubernetes services is advantageous. • Success and lessons of experiences from striving for progress not perfection in the name of Platform reliability. We want to hear about your customer first approach in solving operational problems for both today and the future. • Passion for developing solutions that involve inclusive communication methods to grow and strengthen partner and team relationships. Examples of working in distributed teams or working remotely is desirable BONUS POINTS • You dont need to have all of these items, but these represent the types of work you will do as a Software Engineer at Elastic. • You have designed and built a SaaS product in a public cloud ideally built using Infrastructure-as-Code tooling such as Crossplane or Terraform • You have built Kubernetes-at-scale infrastructure, ideally across multiple cloud providers, and the vital automation to support it. • You have written product features or functions in Golang or other programming languages. • You have worked with containerized services (such as Docker.) • You have proven results in leading and improving cross-team engineering initiatives. • You have experience in system administration with professional skills in Linux on distributed systems at scale. • You have diagnosed or designed, implemented and created solutions with the Elastic Stack. • You are experienced in a self-organizing and sharing in a globally distributed team environment. • You strengthen team members in bringing out the best of each other by uplifting others with coaching and mentoring

Keywords: Elastic, Potomac , Principal Software Engineer (Networking) - Platform, IT / Software / Systems , Washington, Maryland