Data Engineer (Mid or Senior Level) with Security Clearance

SHC Federal is seeking a highly motivated Data Engineer to support our client in the federal defense sector. This position has the exciting opportunity to develop and maintain robust data pipelines that make large volumes of operational data usable, reliable, and accessible for high-impact operations. This is a hybrid position located on-site 3 days a week in Adelphi, MD. The ideal candidate will meet the following criteria:
Requirements:

• Active Top Secret clearance with SCI eligibility
• Bachelor’s Degree with 8+ years of experience; additional experience considered in lieu of degree
• Hands-on experience in data engineering, data analysis, or cybersecurity data engineering
• Proficiency with data parsing and normalization utilizing Elastic/ECS or related technologies
• Experience running Logstash from the command line
• Experience with Elasticsearch, Kibana, Fleet, or other Elastic ecosystem components

Desired:

• Experience with ETL pipelines, data ingestion workflows, parsers, or transformations, including familiarity with index templates, mappings, schemas, and data quality controls
• Python, Bash, or other scripting experience used to automate and support data workflows
• Experience with Kafka, CI/CD tooling, DevSecOps practices, and cloud environments
• Experience in Cybersecurity operations including familiarity with security logs and telemetry, SIEM platforms, threat detection, and incident response

Responsibilities:

• Develop and maintain data pipelines to make operational data usable, reliable, and accessible
• Configure and optimize data ingestion, storage, and retrieval within the Elastic ecosystem (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, Fleet) to enable high-volume, high-availability operations
• Design, maintain, and optimize scalable ETL pipelines, including parsers, transformations, normalization logic, and enrichments for diverse security log and telemetry sources
• Maintain index templates, mappings, schemas, and data models, implementing validation, deduplication, and data quality controls to support data integrity, analytics, and detection logic
• Automate ingestion, transformation, and engineering workflows using Python, Bash, and related tools
• Monitor pipeline and indexing performance, troubleshoot data-flow issues, and improve throughput, storage efficiency, and query performance
• Collaborate with Detection Engineering, Threat Analysis, Endpoint, and other teams to understand and support their data requirements The base pay range for this position is $145,000 – $185,000, depending on experience, skills, and qualifications.