Director of Software Engineering - Distributed Systems, Serverless - Elasticsearch

What is The Role

We are on the lookout for a Director of Software Engineering to lead our Elasticsearch Distributed Systems organisation which focuses on how Elasticsearch provides scale, performance, and resilience, especially in the context of our Serverless offering.

As Director of Software Engineering, you will be leading an organisation of approximately 40 engineers and managers to tackle the deep distributed systems challenges that allow Elasticsearch to excel at scale. Your customers are every Elasticsearch user and each solution team which builds upon Elasticsearch.

Our company is distributed by intention. We hire the best engineers we can find wherever they are, whoever they are. As a result, our team is diverse and distributed across continents. We collaborate every day over email, GitHub, Zoom, and Slack. The ability to lead a distributed team is critical.

What You Will Be Doing

• Develop and execute a long-term engineering strategy for Elasticsearch's distributed systems, aligning technical priorities with product direction and business objectives.
• Drive improvements in performance, scalability, reliability and cost efficiency, including foundational capabilities supporting Serverless Elasticsearch.
• Lead the evolution of Elasticsearch's core distributed architecture, including cluster coordination, data allocation, indexing, replication and recovery.
• Provide technical leadership and oversight for complex engineering initiatives and programs, helping engineering managers and technical leaders navigate architectural decisions and competing priorities.
• Own engineering outcomes across your organisation, balancing technical complexity, customer impact, reliability, operational requirements and long-term maintainability.
• Lead, mentor, hire and develop engineering managers and senior technical leaders, establishing high performance standards and building a strong pipeline of future leaders, fostering an inclusive culture of collaboration and technical excellence.
• Take ownership of organisational planning, staffing and resource allocation, ensuring teams have the capabilities and support needed to deliver on strategic priorities.
• Partner with Product Management, engineering leaders and other teams across Elastic to define priorities and deliver complex initiatives spanning multiple engineering organisations.
• Act as a senior escalation point for critical technical and operational challenges, working closely with engineering, Support and SRE teams to drive effective resolution.
• Communicate engineering strategy, organisational priorities and progress to senior executives, influencing decisions that have a significant impact on Elastic and its customers.
• Run performance management with consistency (promotions, development plans, and managing underperformance through to resolution) and working with your managers to do the same.

What You Bring

• A proven track record of leading large-scale engineering organisations, including experience managing engineering managers and developing senior technical leaders.
• Previous hands-on software engineering experience, with strong computer science fundamentals and substantial technical depth in distributed systems.
• Extensive experience designing, building or operating complex, large-scale distributed systems, ideally involving database engines, distributed storage or large-scale data processing.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems concepts, including concurrency, consistency, replication, fault tolerance, recovery and performance optimisation.
• Experience establishing engineering strategy, making architectural trade-offs and delivering complex initiatives involving multiple teams and significant technical dependencies.
• A track record of building effective engineering organisations, including organisational planning, senior-level hiring, performance management and leadership development.
• Strong operational experience, with a deep understanding of system reliability, production troubleshooting and the challenges of operating distributed systems at scale.
• Experience partnering with senior engineering and product leaders to establish strategic priorities, allocate resources and deliver meaningful business outcomes.
• The ability to navigate complex organisational challenges, influence senior stakeholders and make informed decisions in situations with significant technical or business consequences.
• A compassionate approach to leadership, with a genuine commitment to coaching, developing and supporting the people you work with.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including experience presenting technical strategy and organisational priorities to senior executives.