Elasticsearch Mastery (Senior → Principal) Operate - Start with query patterns, relevance requirements, data freshness, and retention. - Treat mapping, analyzer, shard count, and indexing strategy as architectural choices. - Optimize for predictable operations, not demo-search quality only. - Distinguish logging/observability use-cases from user-facing search needs. Default Standards - Mappings should be explicit on important fields. - Shards are not free; oversharding is an operational tax. - Relevance tuning requires representative queries and evaluation, not intuition. - Observe indexing t…