Tech Lead, Agent Framework - Observability

Elastic Elastic · Enterprise · Canada · Obs - Logs

Tech lead for Elastic's Agent Framework team, focusing on the architecture and technical direction of the agent layer for data collection in the Streams program. The role involves designing scalable architectures, providing technical guidance, collaborating with product management, and leading technical initiatives from design to shipped software. Experience with observability data (metrics, logs, traces) and Go programming is required.

What you'd actually do

  1. Design a scalable and capable architecture for the agent layer. Evaluate and implement new technologies to boost system performance. Conduct reviews of existing architecture to identify areas for improvement and lead architectural discussions to drive decision-making.
  2. Provide technical guidance and support to team members while fostering a culture of continuous learning. Conduct code reviews and offer constructive feedback to improve team performance. Lead by example, demonstrating engineering best practices and setting high standards for quality.
  3. Engage with stakeholders to gather their requirements and expectations appropriately. Collaborate with the product management team to prioritize features based on the input gathered from stakeholders.
  4. Facilitate collaboration across teams by organizing meetings and coordinating efforts. Identify potential risks that could hinder project success and take initiative-taking measures to mitigate them. Adjust project plans in response to changing priorities or feedback from stakeholders to ensure alignment.

Skills

Required

  • Technical lead or principal engineer experience
  • Agent, daemon, or systems-level software project at scale
  • Distributed deployments, versioning, and backward compatibility
  • Observability data collection (metrics, logs, traces)
  • Protocols (OTLP, Prometheus Remote Write, syslog)
  • Go programming
  • Designing management and control planes for distributed software
  • Protocol-driven approaches (OpAMP)
  • Leading large, multi-team technical initiatives
  • Design documentation and socialization
  • Consensus building

Nice to have

  • Elastic Agent, Fleet, Beats, or OpenTelemetry collector internals
  • OpenTelemetry collector configuration, OTLP transport, or upstream contribution
  • Cross platform testing and developer productivity (Linux, Windows, MacOS, containers, Kubernetes)
  • Pipeline execution models and processing languages (Streamlang, Logstash, Fluent)
  • Infrastructure-as-code tooling (CloudFormation, Terraform) for agent deployment
  • Contributions to open source projects in observability or agent ecosystem
  • Async-first work in a globally distributed team

What the JD emphasized

  • Proven experience as a technical lead or principal engineer on an agent, daemon, or systems-level software project at scale managing distributed deployments, versioning, and backward compatibility.
  • Track record of leading large, multi-team technical initiatives from ambiguous design space to shipped software.
  • Comfortable with the full arc of a technical decision: writing the design doc, socializing it across stakeholders, building consensus, and holding the line on what matters.