Senior Elastic Platform Engineer

Zachary Piper Solutions is seeking a Senior Elastic Platform Engineer to support a critical Department of Defense program at Scott Air Force Base, IL . This position will focus on designing, deploying, and managing enterprise Elastic environments supporting mission-critical observability, analytics, and cybersecurity initiatives. The ideal candidate is a platform-focused engineer with strong experience in Elastic, Kubernetes, and containerized environments who can take ownership of the platform and support its continued growth and modernization., * Design, deploy, and maintain enterprise Elastic Stack environments, including Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash, Beats, and Elastic Agents.

• Build and support Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK) deployments within containerized environments.
• Manage and optimize Elastic clusters for scalability, performance, resiliency, and operational efficiency.
• Support Kubernetes-based infrastructure and orchestration platforms, including Rancher-managed environments.
• Develop and maintain data ingestion pipelines and platform integrations across multiple enterprise systems.
• Collaborate with engineering and operations teams to deploy monitoring, logging, observability, and analytics solutions.
• Perform platform troubleshooting, performance tuning, capacity planning, and cluster health management.
• Support migration initiatives involving enterprise logging and observability platforms, including potential Splunk-to-Elastic transitions.
• Implement automation and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) best practices to streamline platform deployment and maintenance.
• Configure security controls, authentication mechanisms, and role-based access controls within Elastic environments.
• Create and maintain technical documentation, architecture diagrams, operational procedures, and engineering standards.
• Support customer meetings, technical reviews, architecture discussions, and program deliverables.
• Mentor junior engineers and collaborate with senior technical leadership to continuously improve platform capabilities.

• 8+ years of experience in Platform Engineering, DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, Systems Engineering, or related technical disciplines.
• Extensive hands-on experience building, deploying, and managing Elastic environments.
• Strong experience with Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash, Beats, and Elastic platform architecture.
• Experience supporting Kubernetes environments in production settings.
• Ability to independently own and manage enterprise-scale Elastic platforms.
• Strong understanding of containerization technologies and cloud-native architectures.
• Experience designing and supporting data pipelines, system integrations, and large-scale logging environments.
• Strong troubleshooting, performance optimization, and operational support experience.
• Experience supporting Linux-based enterprise environments.
• Excellent communication skills and ability to work across technical and operational teams.
• Active Secret Security Clearance required. Interim Secret or Interim Top-Secret clearance may be considered.

Preferred Qualifications Include:

• Hands-on experience with Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK).
• Experience supporting Rancher-managed Kubernetes environments.
• Experience with Elastic Cloud Enterprise (ECE) or Elastic Cloud Hosted (ECH).
• Experience with Cribl data pipeline and observability solutions.
• Prior experience supporting Department of Defense or Federal Government environments.
• Familiarity with SIEM, observability, and cybersecurity-focused Elastic implementations.
• Experience supporting enterprise migration efforts from Splunk or similar logging platforms to Elastic.
• Elastic certification(s) highly desired.

• Salary Range: Up to $230,000-$260,000
• Relocation Assistance Available ($4,000-$5,000+ based on candidate circumstances and negotiations)
• Comprehensive Benefits: Medical, Dental, Vision, 401(k), Paid Time Off, Sick Leave if required by law, and Paid Holidays
• Long-Term Employment Opportunity with Continued Project Placement Beyond Initial Assignment