Senior Elasticsearch Engineer

Chess.com

Senior Elasticsearch Engineer managing Elasticsearch and OpenSearch infrastructure at Chess.com. Owning the full data platform lifecycle with a focus on performance, reliability, and cross-team enablement.

Posted 7/21/2026full-timeRemote • 🌎 Anywhere in the WorldSeniorWebsite

Core Competencies

Role fit

Core Competencies

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Demonstrates extensive expertise in managing Elasticsearch and OpenSearch clusters, with a focus on performance tuning, incident response, and operational excellence. Proficient in GitOps practices and Kubernetes operations for stateful workloads, ensuring high availability and reliability of search and analytics data platforms.

Highest-signal resume keywords

Elasticsearch OperationsOpenSearch ManagementKubernetes OperationsGitOps Infrastructure ManagementIncident Command Experience

ATS Keywords

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Hard Skills

Elasticsearch InternalsCluster ArchitecturePerformance TuningILM/ISM PoliciesSnapshot ManagementQuery OptimizationLinux Systems AdministrationECK (Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes)Data StreamsIndex Design

Soft Skills

Clear CommunicationCross-Team CoordinationIncident Response

Tools & Technologies

KibanaOpenSearch DashboardsHelm ChartsArgoCDFlux

Industry Keywords

Capacity PlanningCluster HealthNode ManagementDisk PressureShard Imbalance

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

CloudElasticSearchFluxKubernetesLinuxNode.js

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Own the full lifecycle of our search and analytics data platform: capacity planning, cluster architecture, performance tuning, incident response, migration strategy, and operational excellence.
Be the single point of deep expertise across all Elasticsearch and OpenSearch clusters at Chess.com.
Hands-on with cluster internals, write ILM/ISM policies, push infrastructure changes through GitOps, and make real-time decisions about replica allocation when a cluster goes red.
On-call ownership for Elasticsearch-related incidents: cluster health degradation, node loss, disk pressure, shard imbalance, and write rejection cascades.
Real-time cluster triage and cross-team coordination during production incidents.
Post-mortem authoring and systemic reliability improvements.
Snapshot and disaster recovery management across clusters.
Advise engineering teams on index design, mapping strategy, retention policies, and query optimization.
Manage Kibana and OpenSearch Dashboards access and configuration for internal consumers.
Define and maintain workload priority tiers across clusters.

Requirements

What you’ll need

7+ years operating Elasticsearch at scale (multi-TB clusters, dozens of nodes, high write throughput)
Deep understanding of Elasticsearch internals: segment merging, translog, shard allocation, and cluster state management
Production experience with ECK (Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes) or equivalent operator-based deployments
Proficiency with Kubernetes operations for stateful workloads (StatefulSets, persistent storage, resource management)
Hands-on Linux systems administration with a focus on storage and I/O performance
Experience managing both Elasticsearch and OpenSearch in production, including an informed opinion on their respective trade-offs
Incident command experience: ability to diagnose and mitigate cluster emergencies under pressure while communicating clearly to stakeholders
Git-based infrastructure management (GitOps): Helm charts, ArgoCD/Flux, infrastructure-as-code for cluster configuration
Fluency with the Elastic stack APIs: cluster administration, index templates, data streams, ILM policies, snapshot/restore.

Benefits

Comp & perks

Full autonomy.
Real scale.
Bare metal.
Strategic impact.
Small team, big trust.