Principal Software Engineer - Builder Experience - Platform Engineering Productivity

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 : Join our Platform Engineering Productivity team as a Principal Software Engineer on AI Enablement and Developer Experience. We're looking for a systems thinker who is curious by nature, stays ahead of the curve on AI and emerging tooling, and takes ownership not just of what the team builds but of how the entire engineering org works. In this role, you'll shape how Elastic engineers build and ship — making AI a genuine accelerant in the development lifecycle while ensuring our products reach customers with high quality. If you thrive in ambiguity, operate with high agency, and are energized by work that multiplies the effectiveness of every team around you, we'd love to hear from you. What You Will Be Doing: • Define the technical vision for AI-assisted development across the org from agent context standards and shared skills to LLM-backed tooling embedded in everyday engineering workflows. • Identify the highest-leverage points in the SDLC where AI can meaningfully reduce toil, then build and ship the tooling to capture that leverage. • Design the guardrails that make AI adoption fast and safe — quality gates, security boundaries, and measurement that tells us whether it's actually working. • Improve CI infrastructure reliability and efficiency, and build the systems that produce releasable artifacts. • Enable ephemeral developer environments and build tooling for product deployment and release. • Define and enforce release quality gates that scale across teams. • Own the metrics that matter: cycle time, adoption, toil reduction — and use them to drive where the team invests next. • Review code to uphold engineering standards, improve performance, and catch defects early. • Partner with engineering and product leadership to align on requirements, testing strategy, and delivery goals. • Drive clear technical communication and alignment across teams, and produce high-quality documentation for systems, processes, and architectural decisions. • Mentor engineers and cultivate a culture where code quality, pragmatism, and AI fluency reinforce each other. What You Bring: • Deep, hands-on fluency with AI-assisted development — integrating LLM APIs into production systems and applying a prompt-engineering mindset to real domain problems. • The judgment to know when AI is the right answer and when it isn't, and the credibility to make that call across the organization. • Comfort moving fluidly across projects, codebases, and evolving team structures — and helping others do the same. • High agency and full ownership of outcomes, with a systems-thinking approach to problems that span team boundaries. • Natural curiosity — you teach yourself new tools and approaches without being asked. Compensation for this role is in the form of base salary. This role does not have a variable compensation component. At Elastic, our compensation philosophy aims to provide fair, competitive and transparent remuneration. Salary ranges are established based on a combination of external market benchmarks, internal pay equity considerations, and the responsibilities and complexity associated with each role. This approach helps ensure consistency across comparable roles while remaining competitive within the relevant labour markets. The final compensation offered within the applicable range will…