Jobs / United States / Elasticsearch INC
Senior Software Engineer - Query Engine, Database Internals - 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're looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join the Elasticsearch - Analytical Engine team. This globally-distributed, completely remote team of senior engineers is responsible for building new analytics capabilities in Elasticsearch’s latest aggregation framework based on a completely new compute engine, and accessed via our new piped query language called ES|QL . This is a senior software engineering role that covers the design and implementation of new features, enhancements to existing features, and resolving bugs. Our company is distributed by intention. We hire the best engineers we can find wherever they are, whoever they are. We collaborate across continents every day over email, GitHub, Zoom, and Slack. At our best, we write fast, scalable, and intuitive software. We believe that the best way to do that is to empower individual engineers, code review every change, decide big things by consensus, and strive for incremental improvements. What You Will Be Doing • You'll be a full-time Elasticsearch contributor, building data-intensive new features and fixing intriguing bugs, all while making the code easier to understand. You are able to research what available data structures and algorithms work best to implement a new functionality or enhancement. Sometimes you’ll need to implement a data structure or algorithm in the code base. And there will be times when you'll need to get close to the operating system and hardware. • You’ll work with a globally distributed team of experienced engineers focused on the search and query (ES|QL) analytics capabilities of Elasticsearch. You’ll get to work with the teams that build the UI to ensure a good user experience, and you’ll get to work with the teams building solutions on top of these APIs • You'll be an expert in several areas of Elasticsearch, and everyone will turn to you when they have a question about them. You'll improve those areas based on your questions and your instincts. • You'll work with community members from all over the world on issues and pull requests, sometimes triaging them and handing them off to other experts, and sometimes handling them yourself. • You'll write idiomatic modern Java -- Elasticsearch is 99.8% Java! What You Bring • You have strong skills in core Java and are conversant in the standard library of data structures and concurrency constructs, as well as newer features like lambdas. • You have experience with software systems engineering • You have a strong desire to optimize and make use of the most efficient data structures and algorithms. • You work with a high level of autonomy, and are able to take on projects and guide them from beginning to end. This covers both technical design and working with other engineers to develop needed components. • You're comfortable developing collaboratively. Giving and receiving feedback on code, approaches, and APIs is hard! Bonus points if you've collaborated over the internet because that's harder. Double bonus points for asynchronous collaboration over the internet. That's even harder, but we do it anyway because it's the best way we know how to build