Jobs / United States / Elasticsearch INC
Principal Java Engineer - Distributed Systems, Serverless - Elasticsearch
Elasticsearch INC · 🇺🇸 United States
Sponsorship verdict
Sponsorship possible
One solid signal, not two — worth applying, and worth asking about sponsorship early.
- Employer is on a government sponsor recordThe US Department of Labor certified 20 H-1B/E-3 labor condition applications for this employer between Oct 2025 and Jun 2026 (latest Jun 2026) — the step every H-1B hire needs first. USCIS also records 8 H-1B approvals in FY2023. Source: LCA disclosure data (US Department of Labor (OFLC)).
- The posting doesn’t mention sponsorshipSilence isn’t a refusal — ask the recruiter before investing much time.
- No salary bar for this routeH-1B has no fixed salary bar: the employer must pay at least the prevailing wage for the role and area. Cap-subject employers enter a lottery weighted by wage level. Source: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/12/29/2025-23853/weighted-selection-process-for-registrants-and-petitioners-seeking-to-file-cap-subject-h-1b, rules effective 2026-02-27.
- What Elasticsearch INC paid sponsored hires in similar roles3 certified filings for “Principal Software Engineer I” (Software Developers) in WA: $277k–$299k, median $290k. Most were filed at wage level IV (100%) — 4 lottery entries, ≈61% projected selection odds for cap-subject employers. Source: US Department of Labor LCA disclosure data (Oct 2025 – Jun 2026).
- Confirmed live todayWhen a source last listed this job as open.
US H-1B: cap-subject employers enter a lottery weighted by wage level — Level I gets 1 entry, Level IV gets 4 (DHS projected selection odds ≈15% at Level I to ≈61% at Level IV). Universities and non-profit research employers are cap-exempt. The $100,000 fee for new petitions from abroad is currently blocked by a court order (appeal pending).
A verdict summarises public evidence; it is not legal advice and never a guarantee — the employer and the immigration authority decide. Sign in to factor in where you can already work.
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Sponsor Radar — Elasticsearch INC
The US Department of Labor certified 20 H-1B/E-3 labor condition applications for this employer between Oct 2025 and Jun 2026 (latest Jun 2026) — the step every H-1B hire needs first. USCIS also records 8 H-1B approvals in FY2023. Source: LCA disclosure data (US Department of Labor (OFLC)).
Past sponsorship or register membership never guarantees sponsorship for this vacancy or for you. Full Sponsor Radar for Elasticsearch INC →
About the role
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: We are on the lookout for a Principal Software Engineer to join our Elasticsearch - Distributed Systems team and focus on how Elasticsearch provides scale, performance, and resilience, especially in the context of our Serverless offering. You will be tackling deep distributed systems challenges in how nodes in an Elasticsearch cluster communicate, and how data are indexed, allocated, and managed across nodes. What You Will Be Doing: • Leveraging your deep distributed systems expertise to design, build, and operate core pieces of our next-generation Serverless Elasticsearch offering, directly impacting the experience of customers worldwide. • Improving Elasticsearch’s components that support concurrent and consistent indexing across multiple machines. • Maintaining our cluster coordination system to keep performance high even though nodes come and go from the cluster and data moves around, while maintaining the safety and liveness properties of the system as a whole. • Pushing the limits on the number of shards, nodes, and petabytes that Elasticsearch can handle today. • Looking into all kinds of issues, including performance or concurrency issues, and proposing solutions. • Supporting our support engineers with the harder problems. • Owning operational investigations end-to-end, until performance or stability issues are successfully resolved. What You Bring: • You have a deep background in distributed systems and consensus algorithms. • You have strong skills in core Java and are conversant in the standard library of data structures and concurrency constructs, as well as newer language features. • You have a deep technical proficiency in algorithms. • You have experience building large-scale distributed systems, rather than making use of off-the-shelf services. • You have experience building and debugging complex features with a broad impact, running on multiple machines. • You are able to own projects from beginning to end. This covers both technical design and working with others to develop needed components. • You have experience managing projects involving multiple engineers. • You have a proven track record of using AI to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimize code, while still owning the final outcomes. • You possess the ability to collaborate across functions and teams and seamlessly transition between different projects, codebases, or teams based on business priorities • You can work autonomously, drive decisions and results in a distributed team by leveraging asynchronous, direct, and transparent communication. Bonus Points: • Data stores • Search, analytics, Lucene • Strong knowledge of the JDK • Asynchronous event-driven network frameworks such as Netty 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 repre