About the Team
Elastic, the Search AI Company, enables everyone to find the answers they need in real time, using all their data, at scale. 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. Elastic's complete, cloud-based solutions for search, security, and observability help organizations deliver on the promise of AI.
The Chat team, part of Elastic's Agents and Context group, builds the conversational and agentic platform that lets customers chat with and operate on their own data in Elasticsearch. The team owns the conversation experience, the agent harness and tools, retrieval and citations, streaming, memory, and the evaluation layer that keeps answers grounded and reliable. Everything they ship is production software that other Elastic solutions build on.
As Senior Engineering Manager you will lead a distributed team of approximately 12 engineers building this platform. Every engineering team at Elastic is led by a trio of Product Manager, Technical Lead and Engineering Manager. You will directly manage the engineers on the team, act as its primary project manager, and work with the PM and Tech Lead to define and deliver the roadmap. This is a people and delivery leadership role in a fast-moving space: the right person is energized by shaping structure where there is little, and keeps a calm, direct style while priorities shift. Elastic is distributed by intention, hiring the best engineers wherever they are; the ability to lead a distributed team is critical.
Responsibilities
•Own delivery of the Chat roadmap: break it into milestones, see around corners on risk, and make sure the team ships predictably.
•Run hiring end to end for the team: job descriptions, interview loops, sourcing with Recruiting, and onboarding.
•Coach and develop engineers at every level, with regular 1:1s, clear expectations and honest feedback.
•Run performance management with consistency: promotions, development plans, and managing underperformance through to resolution.
•Partner with the Tech Lead and PM to shape roadmap and priorities, and with data science, UX, and the other Agents and Context teams on shared primitives and quality signals.
•Build and improve team process (planning, async communication, release and on-call practice) through consensus and clear writing rather than top-down mandate.
•Represent the team to leadership and stakeholders.
Requirements
•A proven track record as an established engineering manager of software engineering teams, including hiring, coaching, promotions and performance management.
•A track record of delivering large, multi-team software initiatives in a distributed, async-first environment, including creating or improving team processes.
•Previous hands-on software engineering experience as a senior contributor, with enough technical depth to understand a TypeScript/Node/React stack, an Elasticsearch-backed system, and how LLM-powered products are built and evaluated. You will not write production code, but you need to spot bottlenecks, risks and one-way-door decisions.
•Familiarity with LLM applications, ideally including RAG, agents and tool use, evaluation, and prompt and context engineering.
•Experience with Elasticsearch, Kibana, search and information retrieval, or open source communities is a plus.
•Product acumen: comfortable with ambiguity, able to set and communicate priorities, and genuinely interested in what makes an agentic product good for users.
•Excellent written and verbal communication. Clear, concise long-form writing is how this team works.
•Direct, kind, calm and empathetic. You hold people accountable and navigate hard conversations without drama.
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
•Matching up to $2000 (or local currency equivalent) for financial donations and service
•Up to 40 hours each year to use toward volunteer projects
•Minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave
Note: Elasticsearch develops and distributes technology subject to U.S. and other countries' export controls and licensing requirements. Individuals located in or nationals of Belarus, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, or Russia (including the Ukrainian territories annexed by Russia: Crimea, DNR, LNR, Kherson or Zaporizhzhia) may require an export license as a condition of employment in this role.
