Search - Workchat - Applied Data Scientist II

Join to apply for the Search - Workchat - Applied Data Scientist II role at Elastic

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.

The Search Conversational Experiences team builds Elastic’s new conversational (agentic) platform that lets customers chat with their own data in Elasticsearch. We own the quality layer for RAG, agents and tools, retrieval/citations, streaming, memory, and—crucially—the evaluation signals that turn open‑ended questions into grounded, reliable answers. As a Data Scientist, you’ll be part of a cross‑functional team (backend, DS, PM, UX) driving chat quality end‑to‑end: designing and running evaluation pipelines, improving prompts and tool behaviors, and turning measurements into product decisions that customers can feel.

You’ll help tackle frontier problems—folding RAG and vector search into an agent’s knowledge base, dynamically enriching model context to boost groundedness, shaping agent routing and tool selection policies, lighting up agent‑driven visualizations on top of Elasticsearch data, and exploring multimodality and reasoning strategies where they truly move the needle. This is an applied role: you will prototype, evaluate, and partner with engineers to ship.

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• Own well scoped pieces of the offline and online evaluation pipeline for agent workflows: retrieval coverage, reranking quality, reasoning traces, tool selection accuracy, citation integrity, and final answer helpfulness and faithfulness.
  
• Calibrate and validate LLM‑as‑judge rubrics against human labels, track agreement with statistics, and add periodic checks to prevent drift.
  
• Instrument agent runs with traces so you can localize errors to retrieval, reasoning, tool execution, or grounding, then contribute CI checks that block merges on regressions.
  
• Translate evaluation readouts into product calls such as model choice, routing policy, tool gating thresholds, prompt and chunking updates, and agent customization for Elastic use cases.
  
• Collaborate with backend engineers on contracts for ES|QL, citations, and telemetry schemas, and with PM and UX to land findings in shipped features.
  
• Share outcomes through clear docs, notebooks, and PRs, and contribute utilities that make evaluation faster and more reproducible for the team.
  

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• 3 to 5 years in applied DS or ML with production ownership, including at least 1 to 2 years focused on evaluating LLM or agent workflows in shipped systems.
  
• Proven experience designing and running stepwise evaluations for agent pipelines: retrieval coverage, reranking quality, reasoning traces, tool selection accuracy, citation grounding, and final answer helpfulness and faithfulness.
  
• Golden set hygiene: stratified dataset design, leakage controls, reviewer guidelines, inter‑rater checks, and versioned labels.
  
• Fluent with offline IR metrics and guardrails: Recall@k, nDCG, MRR, groundedness or citation support, plus latency and cost tracking; can move from offline gains to online A/B tests.
  
• Telemetry and traces for agent runs that localize failures to retrieval, reasoning, tool execution, or grounding; ability to add CI quality gates that block merges on regressions.
  
• Practical Elasticsearch experience or a similar search system; ES|QL familiarity is a plus.
  
• Strong written communication and async collaboration habits in a distributed team.
  

Base salary only, no variable component. Typical starting salary ranges:

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• General locations: $110,900—$175,500 USD
  
• Seattle, LA, SF Bay Area, New York City metro area: $133,200—$210,700 USD
  

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• Competitive pay based on the work you do here and not your previous salary.
  
• Health coverage for you and your family in many locations.
  
• Ability to craft your calendar with flexible locations and schedules for many roles.
  
• Generous number of vacation days each year.
  
• Match up to $2,000 for financial donations and service.
  
• Up to 40 hours each year to use toward volunteer projects you love.
  
• Embracing parenthood with minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave.
  
• Company‑matched 401(k) with dollar‑for‑dollar matching up to 6% of eligible earnings.
  
• Participation in Elastic’s stock program.
  

Elastic is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to creating an inclusive culture that celebrates different perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, ethnicity, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, disability status, or any other basis protected by federal, state or local law, ordinance or regulation. We welcome individuals with disabilities and strive to create an accessible and inclusive experience for all individuals.

Applicants have rights under Federal Employment Laws; view posters linked below: Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) Poster; Pay Transparency Nondiscrimination Provision Poster; Employee Polygraph Protection Act (EPPA) Poster; and Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Poster.