Principal Software Engineer (Platform Billing Core)

• Billing powers Elastic’s Cloud business
• It runs across AWS, GCP, and Azure in over 50 regions
• We oversee usage-based metering, consumption billing, and marketplace integrations at global scale
• The Billing Core team owns the data layer that makes billing correct, auditable, and automated
• We work across two areas:
• Usage — Collect and process usage and cost data
• This data is the foundation of our billing and financial reporting
• Engine — Turn hourly usage data into customer invoices and revenue records
• We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to drive technical direction within the Billing Core domain
• This is a hands-on role
• You will design systems, improve how we operate, and work across teams
• You will help our billing services grow in scale, reliability, and developer productivity
• You will work closely with Product, SRE, and Cloud Infrastructure teams
• Own complex billing and account management systems that span multiple services and cloud providers
• Build large-scale data pipelines for billing data ingestion, transformation, and reconciliation
• Improve observability, incident response, and reliability of core billing systems using modern DevOps practices
• Shape system architecture for scale and modularity. Guide service design, API structure, and data modelling
• Work with SRE and Cloud teams to improve deployment, monitoring, and CI/CD pipelines
• Own PostgreSQL data architecture and performance. Focus on query speed, schema quality, and high availability
• Be the go-to technical reviewer for the billing core stack. Maintain technical consistency and quality standards
• Mentor engineers and tech leads across the Billing organization. Help raise the bar on design and operational standards
• Work with Product, Design, and Finance to set roadmap priorities. Make sure plans are feasible and aligned with business goals
• Take part in on-call rotations. Make sure systems are production-ready through automation, resilience testing, and alerting

Benefits

• Toast to your health: Fully paid health coverage for you and your family, in many locations.
• Craft your calendar: Flexible location and schedule for most roles.
• Create space for you: Distributed by design workforce, plus generous number of vacation days each year.
• Embrace parenthood: Minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave, plus generous family formation benefits.
• Give back your time: 40 hours each year to use toward volunteering with organizations and causes you’re passionate about.
• Amplify your impact: Double your charitable giving — we match donations up to $1500 USD (or local currency equivalent).- Clear written and verbal communication skills. Able to influence across teams and speak to both technical and non-technical partners
• Proven experience improving reliability, observability, and incident response in production systems
• Track record of mentoring engineers, setting technical direction, and raising engineering standards
• Experience with SaaS billing, metering, or financial systems is a real plus
• Comfortable working on your own in a global, distributed, and async environment
• Able to work across projects, work across functions and teams, and adapt to changing team structures
• Ability to lead multi-quarter projects across teams — building consensus and delivering results
• 8+ years in backend or platform engineering, with solid skills in Python and PostgreSQL (schema design, performance, high availability)
• Eligible to work in Department of Defense (DoD) Impact Level 4 or above cloud service environments
• Solid background in cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including networking, IAM, monitoring, and deployment
• Track record of using AI to speed up development, debug complex systems, and improve code quality — while owning the outcomes