Senior Elasticsearch Engineer
Unknown Company
Job Description
<meta><p style="font-family:"Basel Grotesk",Arial,sans-serif;font-size:11pt;font-weight:400;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;margin:4px 0px;padding:0px;"><b><strong style="font-size:18pt;white-space:pre-wrap;">About Us</strong></b></p><p style="font-family:"Basel Grotesk",Arial,sans-serif;font-size:11pt;font-weight:400;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;margin:4px 0px;padding:0px;"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Chess.com is one of the largest gaming sites in the world and the #1 platform for playing, learning, and enjoying chess.</span></p><p style="font-family:"Basel Grotesk",Arial,sans-serif;font-size:11pt;font-weight:400;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;margin:4px 0px;padding:0px;"><br></p><p style="font-family:"Basel Grotesk",Arial,sans-serif;font-size:11pt;font-weight:400;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;margin:4px 0px;padding:0px;"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;">We are a team of 600+ fully remote people in 60+ countries working hard to serve the global chess community. We are here to support 250M+ chess players worldwide with the best possible product, content, and tools to serve the community!</span></p><p style="font-family:"Basel Grotesk",Arial,sans-serif;font-size:11pt;font-weight:400;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;margin:4px 0px;padding:0px;"><br></p><p style="font-family:"Basel Grotesk",Arial,sans-serif;font-size:11pt;font-weight:400;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;margin:4px 0px;padding:0px;"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;">We are a tech company. A gaming company. A content company. And we do it all with passion and commitment to the game. Above all we prize our mission-driven, flat, life-celebrating, no-corporate culture, and we look forward to meeting you and learning more about what you can bring to the team.</span></p><br/><br/><meta><p style="font-family:"Basel Grotesk",Arial,sans-serif;font-size:11pt;font-weight:400;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;margin:4px 0px;padding:0px;"><b><strong style="font-size:18pt;white-space:pre-wrap;">About You</strong></b></p><p style="font-family:"Basel Grotesk",Arial,sans-serif;font-size:11pt;font-weight:400;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;margin:4px 0px;padding:0px;"><br></p><p style="font-family:"Basel Grotesk",Arial,sans-serif;font-size:11pt;font-weight:400;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;margin:4px 0px;padding:0px;"><span style="font-size:11pt;white-space:pre-wrap;">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.</span></p><p style="font-family:"Basel Grotesk",Arial,sans-serif;font-size:11pt;font-weight:400;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;margin:4px 0px;padding:0px;"><br></p><p style="font-family:"Basel Grotesk",Arial,sans-serif;font-size:11pt;font-weight:400;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;margin:4px 0px;padding:0px;"><span style="font-size:11pt;white-space:pre-wrap;">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.</span></p><p style="font-family:"Basel Grotesk",Arial,sans-serif;font-size:11pt;font-weight:400;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;margin:4px 0px;padding:0px;"><br></p><p style="font-family:"Basel Grotesk",Arial,sans-serif;font-size:11pt;font-weight:400;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;margin:4px 0px;padding:0px;"><span style="font-size:11pt;white-space:pre-wrap;">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.</span></p><p style="font-family:"Basel Grotesk",Arial,sans-serif;font-size:11pt;font-weight:400;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;margin:4px 0px;padding:0px;"><br></p><p style="font-family:"Basel Grotesk",Arial,sans-serif;font-size:11pt;font-weight:400;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;margin:4px 0px;padding:0px;"><b><strong style="font-size:18pt;white-space:pre-wrap;">What you'll do</strong></b></p><h3 style="font-family:"Basel Grotesk",Arial,sans-serif;line-height:1.6;font-size:15pt;font-weight:600;letter-spacing:0.25px;margin-top:14px;margin-bottom:4px;padding-left:0px;"><b><strong style="font-size:15pt;white-space:pre-wrap;">Incident Response & Reliability</strong></b></h3><ul data-pattern="discCircleSquare" data-depth="1" style="font-family:"Basel Grotesk",Arial,sans-serif;font-size:11pt;font-weight:400;margin:8px 0px;line-height:1.6;padding:0px 0px 0px 32px;list-style-type:disc;"><li style="margin:3px 0px;font-size:11pt;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Shard allocation strategy for write-heavy data streams at high throughput (millions of documents per minute)</span></li><li style="margin:3px 0px;font-size:11pt;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Disk watermark management, retention policy tuning, and rollover orchestration for high-volume indices</span></li><li style="margin:3px 0px;font-size:11pt;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Performance optimization and I/O tuning on bare-metal nodes</span></li><li style="margin:3px 0px;font-size:11pt;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Write queue analysis, thread pool diagnostics, and shard rebalancing under load</span></li><li style="margin:3px 0px;font-size:11pt;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Capacity planning and growth forecasting across clusters</span></li></ul><h3 style="font-family:"Basel Grotesk",Arial,sans-serif;line-height:1.6;font-size:15pt;font-weight:600;letter-spacing:0.25px;margin-top:14px;margin-bottom:4px;padding-left:0px;"><b><strong style="font-size:15pt;white-space:pre-wrap;">Incident Response & Reliability</strong></b></h3><ul data-pattern="discCircleSquare" data-depth="1" style="font-family:"Basel Grotesk",Arial,sans-serif;font-size:11pt;font-weight:400;margin:8px 0px;line-height:1.6;padding:0px 0px 0px 32px;list-style-type:disc;"><li style="margin:3px 0px;font-size:11pt;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;">On-call ownership for Elasticsearch-related incidents: cluster health degradation, node loss, disk pressure, shard imbalance, and write rejection cascades</span></li><li style="margin:3px 0px;font-size:11pt;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Real-time cluster triage and cross-team coordination during production incidents</span></li><li style="margin:3px 0px;font-size:11pt;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Post-mortem authoring and systemic reliability improvements</span></li><li style="margin:3px 0px;font-size:11pt;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Snapshot and disaster recovery management across clusters</span></li></ul><h3 style="font-family:"Basel Grotesk",Arial,sans-serif;line-height:1.6;font-size:15pt;font-weight:600;letter-spacing:0.25px;margin-top:14px;margin-bottom:4px;padding-left:0px;"><b><strong style="font-size:15pt;white-space:pre-wrap;">Migration & Strategy</strong></b></h3><ul data-pattern="discCircleSquare" data-depth="1" style="font-family:"Basel Grotesk",Arial,sans-serif;font-size:11pt;font-weight:400;margin:8px 0px;line-height:1.6;padding:0px 0px 0px 32px;list-style-type:disc;"><li style="margin:3px 0px;font-size:11pt;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Elasticsearch-to-OpenSearch migration analysis and execution, including compatibility evaluation across ILM/ISM, security models, and plugin ecosystems</span></li><li style="margin:3px 0px;font-size:11pt;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Version upgrade planning and rolling restart orchestration with zero-downtime requirements</span></li><li style="margin:3px 0px;font-size:11pt;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;">End-to-end new cluster provisioning and onboarding</span></li></ul><h3 style="font-family:"Basel Grotesk",Arial,sans-serif;line-height:1.6;font-size:15pt;font-weight:600;letter-spacing:0.25px;margin-top:14px;margin-bottom:4px;padding-left:0px;"><b><strong style="font-size:15pt;white-space:pre-wrap;">Cross-Team Enablement</strong></b></h3><ul data-pattern="discCircleSquare" data-depth="1" style="font-family:"Basel Grotesk",Arial,sans-serif;font-size:11pt;font-weight:400;margin:8px 0px;line-height:1.6;padding:0px 0px 0px 32px;list-style-type:disc;"><li style="margin:3px 0px;font-size:11pt;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Advise engineering teams on index design, mapping strategy, retention policies, and query optimization</span></li><li style="margin:3px 0px;font-size:11pt;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Manage Kibana and OpenSearch Dashboards access and configuration for internal consumers</span></li><li style="margin:3px 0px;font-size:11pt;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Define and maintain workload priority tiers across clusters</span></li></ul><p style="font-family:"Basel Grotesk",Arial,sans-serif;font-size:11pt;font-weight:400;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;margin:4px 0px;padding:0px;"><b><strong style="font-size:18pt;white-space:pre-wrap;">Preferred Skills</strong></b></p><ul data-pattern="discCircleSquare" data-depth="1" style="font-family:"Basel Grotesk",Arial,sans-serif;font-size:11pt;font-weight:400;margin:8px 0px;line-height:1.6;padding:0px 0px 0px 32px;list-style-type:disc;"><li style="margin:3px 0px;font-size:11pt;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;"><b><strong style="white-space:pre-wrap;">7+ years</strong></b><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;"> operating Elasticsearch at scale (multi-TB clusters, dozens of nodes, high write throughput)</span></li><li style="margin:3px 0px;font-size:11pt;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Deep understanding of Elasticsearch internals: segment merging, translog, shard allocation, and cluster state management</span></li><li style="margin:3px 0px;font-size:11pt;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Production experience with ECK (Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes) or equivalent operator-based deployments</span></li><li style="margin:3px 0px;font-size:11pt;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Proficiency with Kubernetes operations for stateful workloads (StatefulSets, persistent storage, resource management)</span></li><li style="margin:3px 0px;font-size:11pt;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Hands-on Linux systems administration with a focus on storage and I/O performance</span></li><li style="margin:3px 0px;font-size:11pt;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Experience managing </span><b><strong style="white-space:pre-wrap;">both Elasticsearch and OpenSearch</strong></b><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;"> in production, including an informed opinion on their respective trade-offs</span></li><li style="margin:3px 0px;font-size:11pt;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Incident command experience: ability to diagnose and mitigate cluster emergencies under pressure while communicating clearly to stakeholders</span></li><li style="margin:3px 0px;font-size:11pt;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Git-based infrastructure management (GitOps): Helm charts, ArgoCD/Flux, infrastructure-as-code for cluster configuration</span></li><li style="margin:3px 0px;font-size:11pt;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Fluency with the Elastic stack APIs: cluster administration, index templates, data streams, ILM policies, snapshot/restore</span></li></ul><h1 style="font-family:"Basel Grotesk",Arial,sans-serif;line-height:1.6;font-size:18pt;font-weight:600;letter-spacing:1px;margin-top:24px;margin-bottom:4px;padding-left:0px;"><b><strong style="font-size:18pt;white-space:pre-wrap;">Bonus Experience</strong></b></h1><ul data-pattern="discCircleSquare" data-depth="1" style="font-family:"Basel Grotesk",Arial,sans-serif;font-size:11pt;font-weight:400;margin:8px 0px;line-height:1.6;padding:0px 0px 0px 32px;list-style-type:disc;"><li style="margin:3px 0px;font-size:11pt;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;">OpenSearch ISM policies and security plugin (fine-grained access control)</span></li><li style="margin:3px 0px;font-size:11pt;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;">GCS or S3 snapshot repository configuration and cross-cluster replication</span></li><li style="margin:3px 0px;font-size:11pt;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Grafana + Prometheus monitoring for Elasticsearch metrics</span></li><li style="margin:3px 0px;font-size:11pt;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Kibana Discover, Dev Tools, and data view management at scale</span></li><li style="margin:3px 0px;font-size:11pt;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Java internals relevant to Elasticsearch JVM tuning (heap sizing, GC tuning, circuit breakers)</span></li><li style="margin:3px 0px;font-size:11pt;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Vault integration for secrets management in Kubernetes-deployed search clusters</span></li><li style="margin:3px 0px;font-size:11pt;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Fluentd/Fluent Bit log pipeline configuration feeding OpenSearch</span></li><li style="margin:3px 0px;font-size:11pt;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Hardware selection experience for search-optimized server configurations</span></li><li style="margin:3px 0px;font-size:11pt;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Python or scripting for operational analysis and automation</span></li></ul><h1 style="font-family:"Basel Grotesk",Arial,sans-serif;line-height:1.6;font-size:18pt;font-weight:600;letter-spacing:1px;margin-top:24px;margin-bottom:4px;padding-left:0px;"><b><strong style="font-size:18pt;white-space:pre-wrap;">What Makes This Role Special</strong></b></h1><ul data-pattern="discCircleSquare" data-depth="1" style="font-family:"Basel Grotesk",Arial,sans-serif;font-size:11pt;font-weight:400;margin:8px 0px;line-height:1.6;padding:0px 0px 0px 32px;list-style-type:disc;"><li style="margin:3px 0px;font-size:11pt;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;"><b><strong style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Full autonomy.</strong></b><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;"> You are the Elasticsearch authority. You make the architecture calls, set the priorities, and own the outcomes.</span></li><li style="margin:3px 0px;font-size:11pt;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;"><b><strong style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Real scale.</strong></b><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;"> Hundreds of terabytes of data, billions of documents, millions of daily queries. The problems here don't exist at smaller companies.</span></li><li style="margin:3px 0px;font-size:11pt;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;"><b><strong style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Bare metal.</strong></b><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;"> No managed Elastic Cloud. You're operating directly on the hardware. This is hands-on engineering.</span></li><li style="margin:3px 0px;font-size:11pt;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;"><b><strong style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Strategic impact.</strong></b><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;"> Your decisions on ES vs. OpenSearch migration, cluster topology, and capacity planning directly affect product capabilities and infrastructure costs.</span></li><li style="margin:3px 0px;font-size:11pt;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;"><b><strong style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Small team, big trust.</strong></b><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;"> </span><a href="http://Chess.com" target="_blank" class="css-173makr-linkStyle" style="color:rgb(30,74,169);cursor:pointer;"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Chess.com</span></a><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;"> runs lean. You won't be buried in process or approvals. Ship changes, fix problems, improve systems.</span></li></ul><p style="font-family:"Basel Grotesk",Arial,sans-serif;font-size:18pt;font-weight:400;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;margin:4px 0px;padding:0px;"><b><strong style="font-size:18pt;white-space:pre-wrap;">About the Opportunity</strong></b></p><ul data-pattern="discCircleSquare" data-depth="1" style="font-family:"Basel Grotesk",Arial,sans-serif;font-size:11pt;font-weight:400;margin:8px 0px;line-height:1.6;padding:0px 0px 0px 32px;list-style-type:disc;"><li style="margin:3px 0px;font-size:11pt;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;"><span style="font-size:11pt;white-space:pre-wrap;">This is a full-time opportunity</span></li><li style="margin:3px 0px;font-size:11pt;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;"><span style="font-size:11pt;white-space:pre-wrap;">We are 100% remote (work from anywhere!)</span></li></ul><p style="font-family:"Basel Grotesk",Arial,sans-serif;font-size:11pt;font-weight:400;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;margin:4px 0px;padding:0px;"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;">---</span></p><p style="font-family:"Basel Grotesk",Arial,sans-serif;font-size:11pt;font-weight:400;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;margin:4px 0px;padding:0px;"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap;">You can learn more about us here:</span></p><ul data-pattern="discCircleSquare" data-depth="1" style="font-family:"Basel Grotesk",Arial,sans-serif;font-size:11pt;font-weight:400;margin:8px 0px;line-height:1.6;padding:0px 0px 0px 32px;list-style-type:disc;"><li style="margin:3px 0px;font-size:11pt;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;"><a href="https://www.chess.com/article/view/how-chess-com-virtual-team-works-together" target="_blank" class="css-173makr-linkStyle" style="color:rgb(30,74,169);cursor:pointer;"><span style="font-size:11pt;white-space:pre-wrap;">https://www.chess.com/article/view/how-chess-com-virtual-team-works-together</span></a></li><li style="margin:3px 0px;font-size:11pt;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:0.25px;"><a href="https://www.chess.com/about" target="_blank" class="css-173makr-linkStyle" style="color:rgb(30,74,169);cursor:pointer;"><span style="font-size:11pt;white-space:pre-wrap;">https://www.chess.com/about</span></a></li></ul>