Engineering

At its heart, ours is a search-engineering business. Our culture and how we work are shaped by our foundation in open source and the fact that we’ve been a global, distributed company from day one. Collaboration and transparency are key to our success as we strive to make the world of data easier to navigate.

Kevin Kluge

Senior Vice President of Engineering

A Bit About Our Team

These are some of the things that make us tick.

Meet Engineering

Software is where we build new tools to enable our community to do more. Our engineering teams are comprised of a diverse mix of people building the Elastic Stack products our users love.

Some teams are big, some are small, some are highly distributed, others are less so. Some of our engineers are specialists in things like search, data ingestion, UI, and machine learning. Others are talented generalists who cover multiple areas and find new ways to integrate and improve our component technologies.

Tools, languages, and what jokes get people laughing might vary across teams, but the fundamental processes are the same. Want to build a new feature or have an idea? Chase it down. Find a bug? Fix it. Then open a PR, ask some truly phenomenal people to review it, fine tune it, and merge it.

Support engineers are unique creatures — part MacGyver, part Grace Hopper, and part Virgil Tibbs — we are always ready and willing to guide our customers to success. Our greatest strength when working with customers is the human connection we build based on trust and understanding.

Our support team stays on top of everything that's changing across the Elastic Stack, curating best practices that can be helpful to the novice and expert alike.

As an open source company, engaging with our community is wildly important. Whether it is in person at a conference, Meetup, or online in a discussion forum, IRC, or GitHub, the Community team’s mission is to educate and help our users be successful. Today, the team spans 10 countries, speaks more than a dozen languages, and travels across the globe to spread knowledge about Elastic and our products . While community is important to every Elastic team, the Community team is lucky enough to get to think about it full time.

Put together one part operations, one part software development, one part internal services, and one part that-special-something, then blend. That’s our Engineering Infrastructure team. From maintaining the build systems to keeping download servers running, plus spinning up new public services, building internal tools, handling Docker, and more — our team is responsible for ensuring smooth operations internally to help the company run better.

This team drives the strategy, policy, and programs for information security company-wide. The team’s responsibilities include risk management, driving compliance initiatives, recommending and implementing security controls, preventing and detecting security threats, and incident response.

Product Design strengthens the ever-changing bridge between pixel and code. With the goal of building interfaces that are accessible to all, our team often iterates between napkin drawings to Sketch designs to React components in the span of a few hours. We maintain the underlying UI framework that keeps the Elastic experience consistent and beautiful from device to device.

Product managers contribute to defining a compelling vision for our products and services. We are passionate about customer success and great user experience, and spend a lot of time engaging with users of our stack. In order to see the big picture, we keep a pulse on latest market and competitive developments, help drive pricing/packaging, and closely track product adoption KPIs. But when it comes to product delivery, we love being hands-on and dive deep. We strive to be the first users of the features that we build, and define our success by how much our customers love our products.

QA's job is to make sure things work great for our users. Just as the products in the Elastic Stack vary in the tools and languages they use, so does our QA team. For some products, QA depends entirely on automated tests, using tools like Vagrant, Ansible, and Selenium. For other products, such as those with significant GUIs, QA dedicates teams to integration testing. Look for our QA folk on the discussion forums and in person at Meetups.

Our developer/sysadmin hybrids live and breathe Elastic Cloud infrastructure, scaling, tooling, automation, and reliability. While battling dark forces to keep the lights on, we collaborate with our globally distributed team to help connect the dots between pull requests and production.

These professional word-herders are embedded in our engineering teams where they can keep their fingers on the pulse of our products. They provide input during development, wordsmith text within our products, and are some of the first people to try out new features. Then they write about them so everyone else can get in on the fun.