Elastic Stack Engineer (Elasticsearch, Kubernetes, OCI) - ACTIVE SECRET CLEARANCE REQUIRED - Remote

Cornerstone Technology Enterprises is seeking an experienced Observability Engineer to support a large-scale Department of Defense IT operations program. This is a platform and infrastructure-focused role, not traditional software development. If you have spent your career building and running observability stacks, managing Kubernetes clusters, and operating cloud infrastructure, this role is built for you.

You will own the Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, Beats) for a DoD environment running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Kubernetes. Day-to-day, that means keeping the platform healthy, onboarding applications into centralized logging and monitoring, building dashboards that give leadership visibility into system health, and automating everything you can.

Candidates with a Cloud Engineer, DevOps Engineer, Platform Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), or Observability Engineer background are strongly encouraged to apply. This role is classified under a contract labor category as Systems Developer - Journeyman, but the work is infrastructure and operations, not application development.

What You Will Do

Elastic Stack Operations (~30%)

• Administer and optimize a self-managed Elasticsearch cluster, including index management, performance tuning, and storage planning
• Build and maintain Kibana dashboards for system health, application performance, security alerting, and executive reporting
• Develop and maintain Logstash pipelines and Beats configurations for log ingestion and normalization
• Troubleshoot ingestion failures, cluster degradation, and alerting gaps

Kubernetes and OCI Infrastructure (~25%)

• Deploy and manage Elastic Stack components on Kubernetes using Elasticsearch on Kubernetes (ECK) and Helm charts
• Scale Elasticsearch nodes, manage persistent storage, and handle cluster upgrades in OCI environments
• Troubleshoot cloud networking, storage, and resource issues across OCI Kubernetes environments
• Apply infrastructure-as-code patterns using Terraform and Helm to maintain consistent, repeatable deployments

Application Onboarding and Log Ingestion (~15%)

• Onboard new applications into the centralized observability platform, including agent installation, log format parsing, index creation, and dashboard development
• Partner with application and DevOps teams to ensure consistent telemetry coverage across the environment
• Normalize and enrich log data to support search, correlation, and analysis

Automation and Reliability (~10%)

• Write Python and Bash scripts to automate deployment, monitoring, and operational tasks
• Contribute to CI/CD pipelines and support Agile team ceremonies
• Develop runbooks, SOPs, and operational documentation

Do you have experience in Threat detection & response?, * Active Secret Clearance

• 4+ years of hands-on experience in a Cloud Engineer, DevOps, SRE, Platform Engineer, or Observability Engineer role
• Proven experience administering and developing with the Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, Beats)
• Strong Kubernetes experience, including deploying and managing stateful workloads (ECK experience a strong plus)
• Hands-on experience with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)
• Proficiency in Python and/or Bash for operational scripting and automation
• Experience with monitoring, alerting, and logging platforms in production environments
• CompTIA Security+ (or ability to obtain within 30 days of start)

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Helm and Terraform for infrastructure-as-code
• Elastic Certified Engineer or similar certification
• Experience supporting DoD environments and familiarity with RMF or DISA STIGs
• Background supporting DMDC or other large-scale DoD IT operations programs
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines (GitLab CI, Jenkins, or similar)
• Familiarity with Agile/Scrum team environments and Jira, * Do you have at least 2+ years of Elasticsearch experience?

License/Certification:

• CompTIA Security+ (Required)

$120,000 - $130,000 a year - Full-time, Pulled from the full job description

• 401(k)
• Health insurance
• Retirement plan
• 401(k) matching
• Paid time off
• Employee discount
• Vision insurance, * 401(k)
• 401(k) matching
• Dental insurance
• Employee discount
• Flexible spending account
• Health insurance
• Health savings account
• Life insurance
• Paid time off
• Retirement plan
• Vision insurance