Staff Software Engineer – Elasticsearch Platform

Role: Staff Software Engineer – Elasticsearch Platform

Location: Chicago, Illinois, United States (Remote)

Duration: Long Term Contract

Job Description

About the Role

As a Staff Software Engineer, you’ll lead the design and evolution of a real-time search platform—the engine powering creator discovery across 30M profiles and billions of posts.

You’ll architect and maintain Elasticsearch clusters, build high-performance APIs in Go, and ensure the scalability and reliability of search at massive scale. This role blends hands-on development with technical leadership, guiding architecture decisions and mentoring engineers to deliver a fast, reliable, and high-impact search experience for clients.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and enhance backend services to meet evolving product requirements, ensuring robust, scalable, and high-performance solutions.
• Contribute across the entire product lifecycle—from design and development to deployment, optimization, and scaling.
• Design, implement, and maintain Elasticsearch environments aligned with performance, reliability, and scalability goals.
• Collaborate closely with Product Managers, Architects, and Engineering teams to understand user needs and translate business requirements into technical solutions.
• Write clean, testable, and maintainable code while upholding engineering best practices.
• Participate in code reviews, architecture discussions, and continuous improvement initiatives.
• Drive technical excellence and foster a culture of ownership, accountability, and collaboration within the engineering team.
• Mentor and support engineers through technical guidance and architectural leadership.

Required Qualifications

• 12+ years of professional software development experience with a strong Computer Science foundation.
• 3+ years of recent hands-on experience with Elasticsearch (or similar search technologies).
• Proven ability to design, build, and operate complex distributed systems and high-load services.
• Deep understanding of Elasticsearch architecture, performance tuning, and operational best practices.
• Experience with AWS services and cloud-native application development.
• Strong Golang development experience, or demonstrated ability and willingness to quickly learn and adopt Go.
• Solid understanding of:
• Object-Oriented Programming (OOP)
• Database concepts (RDBMS and NoSQL)
• Networking fundamentals and distributed system interactions
• Experience developing RESTful APIs and working with modern web application frameworks.
• Proficiency in one or more of the following technologies:
• Python
• PHP
• JavaScript (Node.js)
• Java
• Experience building scalable, high-performance backend services.
• Familiarity with:
• CI/CD pipelines
• Agile development methodologies
• Git-based version control workflows
• Strong verbal and written English communication skills in a global team environment.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with frameworks such as:
• Laravel
• Symfony
• Other enterprise-grade application frameworks
• Cloud certifications or hands-on experience with:
• AWS
• Google Cloud Platform (Google Cloud Platform)
• Microsoft Azure
• Experience with containerization and orchestration technologies such as Kubernetes.
• Passion for continuous learning and staying current with emerging technologies and industry trends.