Elastic

Technology

PrincipalDataScientist-AgentBuilder

£140–210k ~AI est. United Kingdom
Market Sentiment
HIGH DEMAND

Neural analysis suggests this role is
optimal for Senior candidates.

The Brief

“Principal Data Scientist - Agent Builder at Elastic. Skills: Data Science, Machine Learning, AI, LLM. Define evaluation strategy. Lead design of quality metrics”

What You'll Achieve.

Improve chat quality; Measurable product improvements; Ship improvements customers can feel

Industry & Context.

Technology
Problems you'll solve

Ambiguous problems; Cutting-edge problems; Ambiguous domains; Emerging domains

What They're Looking For.

Must Have

8+ years of applied DS/ML experience, Deep expertise in IR, NLP, ranking, semantic search, RAG, or LLM-powered product experiences, Track record defining and leading evaluation for production AI/ML systems, Hands-on ability with Python, Hands-on ability with PyTorch/Transformers, Hands-on ability with Pandas, Hands-on ability with notebooks, Hands-on ability with reproducible experiments, Hands-on ability with versioned datasets, Hands-on ability with clean, reviewable code, Understanding of retrieval systems, Experience collaborating closely with engineering teams, Practical Elasticsearch experience, Excellent written communication, Excellent verbal communication

Nice to Have

PhD preferred, Specific ML framework experience, Cloud platform certs, ES|QL familiarity

What You'll Do.

Define evaluation strategy

Lead design of quality metrics

Build retrieval approaches

Compare retrieval approaches

Guide improvements across retrieval

Turn experimental results into decisions

Partner with engineering to productionize pipelines

Mentor data scientists

Share outcomes through docs

Share outcomes through notebooks

Share outcomes through PRs

Share outcomes through dashboards

Share outcomes through proposals

Share outcomes through reviews

How You'll Work.

Team & Collaboration

Backend engineering; Product; UX; Data scientists; Engineering teams; Leadership audiences

Communication Scope

Explain complex trade-offs

Full Job Description

Elastic, the Search AI Company, enables everyone to find the answers they need in real time, using all their data, at scale — unleashing the potential of businesses and people. The Elastic Search AI Platform, used by more than 50% of the Fortune 500, brings together the precision of search and the intelligence of AI to enable everyone to accelerate the results that matter. By taking advantage of all structured and unstructured data — securing and protecting private information more effectively — Elastic’s complete, cloud-based solutions for search, security, and observability help organizations deliver on the promise of AI. What is The Role The Search Conversational Experiences team builds Elastic’s new conversational and agentic platform that lets customers chat with their own data in Elasticsearch. We build the core quality layer for RAG, agents and tools, retrieval and citations, streaming, memory, and the evaluation signals that turn open-ended questions into grounded, reliable answers. As a Principal Data Scientist, you will help set the technical direction for how we evaluate, improve, and scale chat quality across Elastic’s agentic platform. You will define the evaluation strategy that guides product decisions, including which models we standardize on, how we route requests across agents, which tools we enable and when, and how we tailor agents to different Elastic use cases in search and beyond. You will work closely with backend engineering, product, UX, and other data scientists to turn ambiguous, cutting-edge problems into measurable product improvements. You’ll help lead work on frontier problems such as folding RAG and vector search into an agent’s knowledge base, dynamically enriching model context to improve groundedness, shaping reasoning strategies and tool-selection policies, lighting up agent-driven visualizations on top of Elasticsearch data, and exploring multimodality where it can create meaningful user value. This is an applied leadership role

Free ATS check

Applying for this Principal Data Scientist - Agent Builder role?

Most applicants get filtered before a human reads their resume. See if yours makes the cut.

How to Apply on Greenhouse

  • Create a Greenhouse profile before applying — it saves time across multiple applications.
  • Upload your resume as a PDF; the parser handles it better than Word.
  • Answer all knockout questions carefully — wrong answers auto-reject before a human sees you.
  • Enable email notifications to track application status in real time.

ANONYMOUS · UNFILTERED

What do employees actually say about Elastic?

Real rants from real employees. Read before you apply.

Read Company Rants →