Director - IT Software Engineering

What You Bring

• Required experience
• 12+ years of software engineering experience, including experience managing or leading direct engineering reports or small engineering teams.
• Hands-on familiarity and technical capability with Elasticsearch — data modeling, query design, aggregations, performance tuning, and production operations.
• Proven track record of guiding full-stack engineering delivery end-to-end, from Logstash ingest pipelines to Kibana dashboards to React frontends.
• Proven track record of building, shipping, and managing commercial software or platform systems — not just maintaining existing ones.
• Architectural judgment: the ability to scope a problem correctly, choose the right components, and make executive calls on when to build versus integrate versus buy.
• Strong written communication to author architecture decision records, engineering standards documents, executive proposals, and build-vs-buy analyses.
• Valued experience
• Experience leading teams that build on the Elastic Stack beyond basic logging — Elastic ML, ELSER semantic search, vector search, Kibana Canvas, Watcher, or Elastic Security.
• Experience with FinOps practices: cloud cost management, LLM API cost attribution, or building cost visibility tooling.
• Familiarity with Information Technology managed systems — understanding the core domain problems solved by platforms like Salesforce or ServiceNow.
• Experience working in a hypergrowth or post-IPO technology company where engineering rigor and business speed have to coexist.
• Experience with LLM integration patterns: RAG pipelines, prompt engineering for enterprise use cases, LLM gateway design, or AI-powered workflow automation.
• Contributions to internal developer experience, platform engineering, or engineering productivity tooling.
• What This Role Is Not
• Not a SaaS administrator or vendor manager: This is an engineering execution role, not a role for managing third-party vendor contracts, Salesforce admins, or ServiceNow developers.
• Not a pure infrastructure or DevOps role: Your team uses cloud infrastructure, but the primary deliverable is production-grade software systems, not infrastructure configuration.
• Not a hands-off hands-free manager: While you will manage a small team, you are expected to stay deep in the architecture, review code, and set technical directions hands-on.
• Not a role for rigid processes: Projects begin with open-ended questions ('Could we build this?') and require you and your team to define and ship the answer.
• Compensation for this role is in the form of base salary. This role does not have a variable compensation component.
• The typical starting salary range for new hires in this role is listed below. In select locations (including Seattle WA, Los Angeles CA, the San Francisco Bay Area CA, and the New York City Metro Area), an alternate range may apply as specified below.
• These ranges represent the lowest to highest salary we reasonably and in good faith believe we would pay for this role at the time of this posting. We may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range, and the ranges may be modified in the future.
• An employee's position within the salary range will be based on several factors including, but not limited to, relevant education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, geographic location, performance, and business or organizational needs.
• Elastic believes that employees should have the opportunity to share in the value that we create together for our shareholders. Therefore, in addition to cash compensation, this role is currently eligible to participate in Elastic's stock program. Our total rewards package also includes a company-matched 401k with dollar-for-dollar matching up to 6% of eligible earnings, along with a range of other benefits offered with a holistic emphasis on employee well-being.

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