Figured this out. Basically an error on our end. In our spec_helper we were attempting to stub out elasticsearch for our tests and were using RestClient gem to do so. When factory builder created a new test object, it was triggering the after_save method and then elasticsearch was sending a post request which was getting partially stubbed by RestClient ("RestClient.stub(:post)").
Edit
The link I posted to better stub elasticsearch / rspec tests was taken down and Tire is now being deprecated in favor of Karmi's new elasticsearch-rails gem which has testing built-in. Please check out Pivotal labs post on how to test elasticsearch queries.