Principal AI Engineer (Agents and Context)

Join Elastic as a Principal AI Engineer, where you'll lead the improvement loop for the Context Engine, a key component of our AI-driven products. You'll work at the intersection of engineering, data science, and product, writing production code, designing evaluation and telemetry, and setting the technical bar for agentic behavior. This hybrid role offers flexible location and schedule, fully paid health coverage, generous vacation days, and more.

Responsibilities

• Own the production improvement loop for the Context Engine, understanding how extraction automations, retrieval tools, and memory behave, and implementing fixes as needed.
• Define how to iterate on agents and skills safely, including versioning and rollout of prompts, skills, and automations, regression coverage, and staged evaluation.
• Design the telemetry needed to make data-informed engineering decisions, including what to capture from agent traces, tool calls, and knowledge retrieval.
• A track record of eval-driven product improvement: you have diagnosed agent or LLM behaviour from traces and user feedback, designed the evaluation that exposed the problem, shipped the fix and measured the outcome

Requirements

• Direct experience building agents with state and memory, and iterating on prompts, skills and tool behaviour safely in production
• Familiarity with MCP, including exposing public MCP servers and tools
• Experience designing telemetry for AI systems, and using it to make engineering and product decisions
• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with the recent years spent shipping and operating AI-driven products on real production traffic, ideally products with public APIs and data models that had to evolve without breaking customers
• Comfort working with data scientists, engineers, and product managers as peers, translating between measurement and shipping, and communicating trade-offs clearly
• Experience running product experiments end to end: instrumentation, unattended execution, and interpreting results
• A pragmatic, low-ego style suited to a distributed, async-first team
• Experience building products with public APIs and evolving data models, and the judgement that comes with maintaining external contracts as a product changes
• Strong backend engineering skills in either Python or TypeScript: APIs, stateful workflows, data pipelines and production services
• Agentic retrieval experience, including knowledge representation
• Experience with agent frameworks such as LangGraph, CrewAI, Claude Agent SDK, or similar

Preferred

• Practical Elasticsearch experience

Pay

EUR 80,400 - 127,200