Data Engineer (Elastic Stack SME) - Active Secret or TS/SCI
- Colorado Springs, CO, USA
- Full-Time
- On-Site
- 160,000-220,000 USD / Year
Job Description:
Location: Colorado Springs, CO (Onsite)
Clearance: Active Secret or TS/SCI
Compensation: Up to $215k+ (Commensurate with experience and clearance level)
The Opportunity
We are seeking a highly skilled Data Engineer to serve as a Subject Matter Expert (SME) in designing, implementing, and maintaining large-scale log ingestion architectures. This role focuses on building robust ingestion pipelines from multiple heterogeneous data sources and supporting high-availability production environments on air-gapped and restricted networks. You will be primarily responsible for ensuring data ingested into Elastic Security is identified, categorized, processed, and transformed in a reliable, scalable, and secure manner.
Core Responsibilities
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Pipeline Architecture: Design and manage multi-pipeline Logstash architectures, including pipeline-to-pipeline routing and output isolator patterns.
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Data Normalization: Normalize incoming data into Elastic Common Schema (ECS) compliant formats.
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Performance Tuning: Tune Logstash JVM performance and troubleshoot ingestion bottlenecks to ensure mission-critical uptime.
- Strategic Engineering: Work directly with security analysts and customers to prioritize high-value data, efficiently archiving less valuable data and eliminating zero-value noise.
- Secure Data Flow: Apply data processing routines at the most efficient location as data flows through the pipelines, ensuring networks are not directly exposed by utilizing specific devices or DMZs for collection.
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System Maintenance: Maintain the technical baseline of Logstash nodes deployed as VMs and Kubernetes Pods.
Technical Requirements
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Elastic Stack Expertise: Deep experience with Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, and Elastic Agent/Fleet.
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Parsing & Transformation: Expert proficiency with Grok, Dissect, KV, JSON decoding, and Translate filters.
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Environment Experience: Proven ability to support air-gapped artifact and package repositories and implement ingestion resiliency/failover strategies.
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Data Sources: Experience ingesting logs from endpoints, network devices, cloud-native resources, Linux Audit, and Windows Event Logs.
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Team Leadership: Ability to mentor team members by providing specialized data engineering training.
Additional Information
- Work Environment: This position requires being onsite 4–5 days per week.
- Clearance Growth: While a Secret clearance is required for certain tasks, there may be opportunities for clearance upgrades to the TS/SCI level based on mission requirements.
- Benefits: Very strong 401(k), family medical benefits, thousands of dollars in training budget and much more