Lead Platform Engineer

Job Title: Lead Platform Engineer

Work Location: Evansville, IN; Baltimore, MD; Wilmington, DE; Charlotte, NC; Irving, TX (Hybrid)
Long Term Contract

If you find this opportunity suitable, kindly share your updated resume. Also, please let me know a good time to connect with you for a quick discussion.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Job Description

Role Summary

The Lead Platform Engineer ELK Stack Administration serves as a senior technical contributor and subject-matter expert for the Elastic Stack, including Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, and related data-ingestion and observability technologies.

The primary focus of this role is the administration, reliability, performance, security, scalability, and ongoing improvement of Elastic environments across cloud and on-premises infrastructure. The engineer will design, deploy, monitor, troubleshoot, automate, and support highly available Elastic platforms used for centralized logging, search, metrics analytics, observability, and data-driven applications.

In addition to the core ELK Stack responsibilities, this role will assist with broader platform engineering, DevOps, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, automation, monitoring, and operational support activities as business and team needs require.

The successful candidate will work closely with application development, architecture, security, cloud, networking, observability, and operations teams in an Agile delivery environment.

Key Responsibilities

• ELK Stack Administration and Operations
• Platform Design and Engineering
• Performance, Reliability, and Capacity Management
• Automation and DevOps Integration
• Observability and Operational Excellence
• Technical Leadership and Collaboration
• Mentorship and Continuous Improvement

Additional Information

Primary skill emphasis:

Elasticsearch and ELK Stack administration.

The employee may assist with additional platform engineering, DevOps, automation, cloud, infrastructure, and operational duties based on business needs.

Skill/Experience/Education

Mandatory Skills

Advanced hands-on experience administering production ELK/Elastic Stack environments, including Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. Strong knowledge of Elasticsearch cluster architecture, including node roles, shards, replicas, mappings, templates, aliases, data streams, and index lifecycle management. Experience deploying, configuring, monitoring, maintaining, and troubleshooting highly available multi-node Elasticsearch clusters. Proven ability to diagnose and resolve cluster health, indexing, query performance, shard allocation, JVM, storage, and data-ingestion issues. Experience performing Elastic Stack upgrades, patching, migrations, backups, snapshots, restoration, and disaster-recovery activities. Experience designing and maintaining Logstash pipelines, Elasticsearch ingest pipelines, Beats, Elastic Agent, or equivalent data-ingestion integrations. Knowledge of Elastic security capabilities, including authentication, authorization, role-based access control, encryption, certificates, and audit logging. Experience with Elasticsearch performance tuning, capacity planning, index optimization, query optimization, shard rebalancing, and retention management. Hands-on experience creating and supporting Kibana dashboards, visualizations, monitoring, and alerting. Experience with Infrastructure as Code and configuration-management tools, particularly Terraform and Ansible. Experience developing automation and operational tooling using Python, Bash, APIs, or similar scripting technologies. Working knowledge of CI/CD pipelines, Git-based source control, automated deployments, and configuration validation. Experience supporting Elastic platforms in cloud, on-premises, or hybrid infrastructure environments. Understanding of platform reliability and operational practices, including monitoring, alerting, incident response, SLOs, runbooks, and problem management.

Desired Skills

Strong troubleshooting, analytical, documentation, communication, and cross-functional collaboration skills.

Ability to work independently as a senior individual contributor, provide technical leadership, and mentor other engineers.

Willingness and ability to assist with broader platform engineering, DevOps, automation, cloud, infrastructure, and operational responsibilities as needed.