Senior Elasticsearch Engineer

About the Company

Chess.com is one of the largest gaming sites in the world and the #1 platform for playing, learning, and enjoying chess. We are a team of 600+ fully remote people in 60+ countries working hard to serve the global chess community.

Responsibilities

• Manage shard allocation strategy and write-heavy data streams at high throughput
• Perform performance optimization and I/O tuning on bare-metal nodes
• Handle on-call ownership for Elasticsearch-related incidents and cluster health degradation
• Execute Elasticsearch-to-OpenSearch migration analysis and execution
• Advise engineering teams on index design, mapping strategy, and query optimization
• Manage cluster capacity planning and growth forecasting

Requirements

• 7+ years operating Elasticsearch at scale
• Deep understanding of Elasticsearch internals including segment merging and shard allocation
• Production experience with ECK or equivalent operator-based deployments
• Proficiency with Kubernetes operations for stateful workloads
• Hands-on Linux systems administration with a focus on storage and I/O
• Experience managing both Elasticsearch and OpenSearch in production
• Proficiency with GitOps workflows using Helm, ArgoCD, or Flux
• Fluency with Elastic stack APIs and ILM policies

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with OpenSearch ISM policies and security plugins
• Knowledge of GCS or S3 snapshot repository configuration
• Experience with Grafana and Prometheus monitoring
• Understanding of Java internals for JVM tuning
• Proficiency in Python or scripting for automation