Elasticsearch Lead Engineer - SIEM Platform

About the role

The Elasticsearch Lead Engineer – SIEM Platform is responsible for architecting and maintaining high-availability Elasticsearch clusters supporting large-scale security event ingestion. This role involves defining and enforcing Elastic Common Schema (ECS) field mappings, designing and developing custom data ingestion pipelines, integrating with AWS services, managing AWS infrastructure, implementing data lifecycle management, partnering with Detection Engineering and Threat Intelligence teams, establishing and maintaining cluster security controls, building resilient, fault-tolerant architectures, performing platform health monitoring, troubleshooting production issues, defining Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and mentoring junior engineers.

Responsibilities

• Architect and maintain high-availability Elasticsearch clusters supporting large-scale security event ingestion
• Define and enforce Elastic Common Schema (ECS) field mappings across all data sources, ensuring consistent normalization for detection rules and analytics
• Design and develop custom data ingestion pipelines using Elasticsearch
• Integrate with AWS services including S3, Kinesis Data Streams, Lambda, and CloudWatch for log collection
• Manage AWS infrastructure: EC2, S3, IAM, and Secrets Manager – using AWS CloudFormation
• Implement data lifecycle management – hot/warm/cold/frozen tier strategies, ILM policies, and snapshot/restore to S3-based data lakes
• Partner with Detection Engineering and Threat Intelligence teams to optimize index strategies, queries, and dashboards in Kibana
• Establish and maintain cluster security controls: TLS/mTLS, role-based access control (RBAC), audit logging, and encryption at rest
• Build resilient, fault-tolerant architectures: cross-cluster replication, shard allocation awareness, and disaster recovery runbooks
• Perform activities related to platform health monitoring and upgrade / patching
• Troubleshoot and manage production technical issues related to Elasticsearch cloud
• Define and enforce SLOs for ingestion latency, query performance, and cluster availability
• Mentor junior engineers and establish best practices, runbooks, and architectural standards

Qualifications

• Minimum of six years related work experience
• Undergraduate degree in a related field or the equivalent combination of training and experience
• 6+ years of Elasticsearch / Elastic Stack (ELK) experience in a production security or observability environment
• Deep understanding of Elastic Common Schema (ECS) and experience mapping diverse log sources (Windows, Linux, network, cloud, EDR) to ECS
• Hands-on experience operating Elasticsearch at scale (10TB+/day ingest, 100+ node clusters)
• Proficiency with AWS – Kinesis, S3, IAM, CloudTrail, and AWS-native log sources
• Experience with data streaming platforms – Apache Kafka, or Confluent Platform – for high-throughput event ingestion
• Experience integrating with data lake platforms – AWS S3 / Lake Formation, Data Lake, or Apache Iceberg for long-term retention and threat hunting
• Strong understanding of security principles: least privilege, network segmentation, secrets management, audit logging
• Experience building resilient systems: replication topologies, capacity planning, chaos engineering mindset, and documented DR procedures
• Proficiency with infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, Ansible, or CDK) (Optional)

Preferred Qualifications

• Elastic Certified Engineer or Elastic Certified Analyst certification
• Experience with Elastic Security / SIEM detection rules, ML jobs, and Timeline investigations
• Familiarity with MITRE ATT&CK framework and how it informs index and detection design
• Experience with container-based deployments of Elastic (ECK / Kubernetes)
• Knowledge of compliance frameworks: SOC 2, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, or FedRAMP