Senior Elasticsearch Engineer at Chess

, , -

Full Time

Start Date

Immediate

Expiry Date

18 Oct, 26

Salary

0.0

Posted On

20 Jul, 26

Experience

5 year(s) or above

Remote Job

Yes

Telecommute

Yes

Sponsor Visa

Skills

Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Kubernetes, ECK, Linux Systems Administration, GitOps, Helm, ArgoCD, Flux, Kibana, JVM Tuning, Python, Capacity Planning, Incident Response, Infrastructure as Code, Data Streams

Industry

technology;Information and Internet

Description

About You Chess.com is the world's largest chess platform with 235M+ members and ~20 million daily games. Our Elasticsearch and OpenSearch infrastructure underpins search, user activity, analytics, logging, and operational intelligence at massive scale, hundreds of terabytes across a dozen production clusters running on bare-metal Kubernetes. We're looking for a Senior Elasticsearch Engineer who can own the full lifecycle of our search and analytics data platform: capacity planning, cluster architecture, performance tuning, incident response, migration strategy, and operational excellence. You'll be the single point of deep expertise across all Elasticsearch and OpenSearch clusters at Chess.com. This is not a monitoring-from-dashboards role. You'll be 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. What you'll do Incident Response & Reliability Shard allocation strategy for write-heavy data streams at high throughput (millions of documents per minute) Disk watermark management, retention policy tuning, and rollover orchestration for high-volume indices Performance optimization and I/O tuning on bare-metal nodes Write queue analysis, thread pool diagnostics, and shard rebalancing under load Capacity planning and growth forecasting across clusters Incident Response & Reliability 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 Migration & Strategy Elasticsearch-to-OpenSearch migration analysis and execution, including compatibility evaluation across ILM/ISM, security models, and plugin ecosystems Version upgrade planning and rolling restart orchestration with zero-downtime requirements End-to-end new cluster provisioning and onboarding Cross-Team Enablement 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 Preferred Skills 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 Bonus Experience OpenSearch ISM policies and security plugin (fine-grained access control) GCS or S3 snapshot repository configuration and cross-cluster replication Grafana + Prometheus monitoring for Elasticsearch metrics Kibana Discover, Dev Tools, and data view management at scale Java internals relevant to Elasticsearch JVM tuning (heap sizing, GC tuning, circuit breakers) Vault integration for secrets management in Kubernetes-deployed search clusters Fluentd/Fluent Bit log pipeline configuration feeding OpenSearch Hardware selection experience for search-optimized server configurations Python or scripting for operational analysis and automation What Makes This Role Special Full autonomy. You are the Elasticsearch authority. You make the architecture calls, set the priorities, and own the outcomes. Real scale. Hundreds of terabytes of data, billions of documents, millions of daily queries. The problems here don't exist at smaller companies. Bare metal. No managed Elastic Cloud. You're operating directly on the hardware. This is hands-on engineering. Strategic impact. Your decisions on ES vs. OpenSearch migration, cluster topology, and capacity planning directly affect product capabilities and infrastructure costs. Small team, big trust. Chess.com runs lean. You won't be buried in process or approvals. Ship changes, fix problems, improve systems. About the Opportunity This is a full-time opportunity We are 100% remote (work from anywhere!) --- You can learn more about us here: https://www.chess.com/article/view/how-chess-com-virtual-team-works-together https://www.chess.com/about

How To Apply:

Incase you would like to apply to this job directly from the source, please click here

Responsibilities

Own the full lifecycle of the search and analytics data platform, including cluster architecture, performance tuning, and capacity planning. Manage incident response and reliability for massive-scale Elasticsearch and OpenSearch clusters running on bare-metal Kubernetes.