Elastic Engineer

Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Security Operations Center (SOC) is a US Government program responsible to prevent, identify, contain and eradicate cyber threats to CBP networks through monitoring, intrusion detection and protective security services to CBP information systems including local area networks/wide area networks (LAN/WAN), commercial Internet connection, public facing websites, wireless, mobile/cellular, cloud, security devices, servers and workstations.  The CBP SOC is responsible for theoverall security of CBP Enterprise-wide information systems, and collects, investigates, and reports any suspected and confirmed security violations.

We are seeking a talented and motivated Mid-Level Elastic Engineer to join our team. The ideal candidate will have experience working with Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, and Beats) to develop, manage, and support scalable search and analytics solutions. The candidate will be part of the Enterprise Logging Solution Team, responsible for maintaining CBP’s Elasticinstances with a heavy emphasis on data on-boarding, content development, configuration, troubleshooting, reporting, and visualizations.  Prior experience with Splunk is a strong plus.

Primary Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain custom dashboards using Elastic stack for monitoring and visualization of system metrics, logs, and traces.

• Monitor and optimize the performance of Elastic Stack clusters to ensure high availability, reliability, and performance.

• Work with data sources and ETL processes to integrate and normalize data into Elasticsearch, ensuring data quality and consistency.

• Implement and maintain security best practices for Elastic Stack, including access controls, encryption, and compliance with regulatory standards.

• Create and maintain comprehensive documentation for Elastic Stack configurations, processes, and procedures.

• Maintain Elasticsearch clusters in a cloud based environment across multiple availability zones.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelors’ degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, Cyber Security, or related field and 4 to 8 years of related experience.  Additional years of experience and cyber certifications may be considered in lieu of degree.

• 3+ years of Elasticsearch stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Beats, Kibana) experience in active production environment.

• Experience with data ingest, Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) techniques.

• Experience with multi-node clustering, architecture, development, implementation, and health monitoring of the indexes.

• Advanced understanding of Elasticsearch Management, reindexing and data mappings, JSON and KQL searching syntax, and Kibana dashboard options.

• Experience working with various versions of JAVA.

• Experienced Linux administrator with strong bash scripting ability.

• Proficient with managing AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service.

• Experience troubleshooting, tuning, and configuring Elasticsearch clusters, nodes, shards, and analyzers from the “ground up.”

• Experience configuring and managing Elastic CDM Dashboard / XML.

• Proficient with Ansible Ad-hoc commands and creating / editing playbooks for automation.

• Experience designing, documenting, implementing, securing, and maintaining Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana (ELK Stack) Enterprise solutions.

• Excellent problem-solving skills with the ability to troubleshoot and resolve complex issues in a timely manner.

• All Department of Homeland Security CBP SOC employees are required to favorably pass a 5-year (BI) Background Investigation.

• Familiar with the management, operational, and technical aspects of IT Security in a complex enterprise environment.

Preferred Qualifications

• Elastic Engineer, Elastic Analyst, and/or Elastic Observability Engineer Certifications.

• Experience with deploying and using Elasticsearch in Commercial Cloud Platform (ex, AWS, Google Cloud, Azure).

• Proficiency in scripting languages such as Pythonor PowerShell for automation and integration tasks.

• Knowledge of PKI (ability to create and validate certificates).

• Prior experience with CBP