Senior Elasticsearch Engineer

About Us Chess.com is one of the largest gaming sites in the world and the #1 platform for playing, learning, and enjoying chess. 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! 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. 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 aSenior Elasticsearch Engineerwho 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+ yearsoperating 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 managingboth Elasticsearch and OpenSearchin 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,...