Principal software developer/Tech Lead, Agent Framework - Observability

September 15, 2026

About the position

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. Elastic's Streams program is the unified platform for getting data into Elasticsearch from edge collection all the way through cloud processing. At the edge, Elastic Agent and Beats are how data leaves customer infrastructure. This role is the tech lead position for the Agent Framework team: you will own the architecture, set the technical direction, and be the primary decision-maker for how Elastic's agent layer evolves to support the Streams model.

Responsibilities

Design a scalable and capable architecture for the agent layer.
Evaluate and implement new technologies to boost system performance.
Conduct reviews of existing architecture to identify areas for improvement and lead architectural discussions to drive decision-making.
Provide technical guidance and support to team members while fostering a culture of continuous learning.
Conduct code reviews and offer constructive feedback to improve team performance.
Lead by example, demonstrating engineering best practices and setting high standards for quality.
Engage with stakeholders to gather their requirements and expectations appropriately.
Collaborate with the product management team to prioritize features based on the input gathered from stakeholders.
Facilitate collaboration across teams by organizing meetings and coordinating efforts.
Identify potential risks that could hinder project success and take initiative-taking measures to mitigate them.
Adjust project plans in response to changing priorities or feedback from stakeholders to ensure alignment.

Requirements

Proven experience as a technical lead or principal engineer on an agent, daemon, or systems-level software project at scale managing distributed deployments, versioning, and backward compatibility.
Deep knowledge of observability data collection: metrics, logs, traces, and the protocols that carry them (OTLP, Prometheus Remote Write, syslog, etc.).
Solid background in Go (Elastic Agent and Beats are primarily Go).
Experience designing management and control planes for distributed software particularly protocol-driven approaches like OpAMP.
Track record of leading large, multi-team technical initiatives from ambiguous design space to shipped software.
Proven ability to seamlessly transition between different projects and codebases, and work with different teams based on dynamic business priorities.
Comfortable with the full arc of a technical decision: writing the design doc, socializing it across stakeholders, building consensus, and holding the line on what matters.
Great written communication you produce design docs and ADRs that others trust and reference long after the decision is made.

Nice-to-haves

Direct experience with Elastic Agent, Fleet, Beats, or OpenTelemetry collector internals.
Experience with OpenTelemetry collector configuration, OTLP transport, or upstream contribution.
Experience with cross platform testing and developer productivity spanning all of Linux, Windows, MacOS, containers, and Kubernetes.
Knowledge about pipeline execution models and processing languages (Streamlang, Logstash, Fluent, etc.).
Experience with CloudFormation, Terraform, or other infrastructure-as-code tooling in the context of agent deployment.
Contributions to open source projects in the observability or agent ecosystem.
Comfort working async-first across a globally distributed team.

Benefits

Competitive pay based on the work you do here and not your previous salary
Health coverage for you and your family in many locations
Ability to craft your calendar with flexible locations and schedules for many roles
Generous number of vacation days each year
Increase your impact - We match up to \$2000 (or local currency equivalent) for financial donations and service
Up to 40 hours each year to use toward volunteer projects you love
Embracing parenthood with minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave
Company-matched Registered Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP) with dollar-for-dollar matching up to 6% of eligible earnings
Eligible to participate in Elastic's stock program

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