Principal AI Engineer - Context - Agents and ContextNew$46K–$183K

The opportunity

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…

What you'll do

  • Own the production improvement loop for Context Engine: understand how extraction automations, retrieval tools and memory behave, based on offline evaluations and customer conversations and telemetry. You help find the failure modes, fix them, and prove the fix.

  • Define how we iterate on agents and skills safely: versioning and rollout of prompts, skills and automations, regression coverage, staged and shadow evaluation, and the guardrails that let us change behaviour without breaking customers.

  • Design the telemetry we need to make data-informed engineering decisions: what to capture from agent traces, tool calls and knowledge retrieval, how it lands in Elasticsearch, and how it feeds evaluation, dashboards and the feedback loop.

  • Partner with the data science team on evaluation strategy: golden datasets, evaluators to gate on quality, latency and cost.

  • Raise the bar across the team: review designs and PRs, mentor engineers in eval-driven development, and write the technical proposals that shape the roadmap.

  • + 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.

What they're looking for

  • 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.
  • 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.