About this 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
The enterprise software landscape is undergoing a structural shift. AI-assisted development has dropped the cost and time required to build custom internal tools by more than half. Retool's 2026 State of Internal Software report found that 35% of enterprises have already replaced SaaS tools with purpose-built software, and 78% plan to build more in the year ahead. The calculus has changed: what previously required a six-figure vendor contract and a year-long implementation is now a small engineering team and a few focused sprints.
Elastic is at the beginning of this journey. We operate the Elastic Stack — Elasticsearch, Kibana, Elastic ML, and a growing set of AI-native capabilities — at production scale for thousands of customers. And we are increasingly building on our own platform internally: replacing expensive SaaS tools with Elastic-native systems that are faster, more intelligent, and owned entirely by us.
We are looking for a Principal Engineer to join our Information Technology team to be part of this effort. This is not a support role or a tools administrator position. It is a senior engineering role for someone who can look at a $500,000 annual SaaS contract and ask: 'Could we build a better version of this on Elasticsearch in twelve weeks?' — and then go do it.
This is a rare opportunity to do original product engineering inside an IT organization, working with a platform that most engineers only get to use as a customer — and to build systems that directly shape how a public company operates.
What You Will Be Doing
Lead strategic build-vs-buy Engineering
You will work with IT leadership, Finance, and Engineering to evaluate Elastic's internal SaaS portfolio and identify where custom-built systems — backed by Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Elastic's AI capabilities — deliver better value than continued vendor contracts. You will own the architecture, engineering systems, build plan, and delivery of the highest-priority replacements.
Design and build Elastic-native internal platforms
The project portfolio spans four areas where the build-vs-buy shift is most compelling:
• Platform productivity tools — internal developer portals, knowledge search layers, engineering onboarding systems, and workspace tooling that unifies disparate SaaS tools into a single Elasticsearch-backed search and in