Data Engineer - Active Secret or TS/SCI
Plug Consulting
Colorado Springs, CO
Location: Colorado Springs, CO (Onsite)
Clearance: Active Secret or TS/SCI
Compensation: Up to $215k+ (Commensurate with experience and clearance level)
The Opportunity
We are seeking a highly skilled Data Engineer to serve as a Subject Matter Expert (SME) in designing, implementing, and maintaining large-scale log ingestion architectures. This role focuses on building robust ingestion pipelines from multiple heterogeneous data sources and supporting high-availability production environments on air-gapped and restricted networks. You will be primarily responsible for ensuring data ingested into Elastic Security is identified, categorized, processed, and transformed in a reliable, scalable, and secure manner.
Core Responsibilities
Pipeline Architecture: Design and manage multi-pipeline Logstash architectures, including pipeline-to-pipeline routing and output isolator patterns.
Data Normalization: Normalize incoming data into Elastic Common Schema (ECS) compliant formats.
Performance Tuning: Tune Logstash JVM performance and troubleshoot ingestion bottlenecks to ensure mission-critical uptime.
- Strategic Engineering: Work directly with security analysts and customers to prioritize high-value data, efficiently archiving less valuable data and eliminating zero-value noise.
- Secure Data Flow: Apply data processing routines at the most efficient location as data flows through the pipelines, ensuring networks are not directly exposed by utilizing specific devices or DMZs for collection.
System Maintenance: Maintain the technical baseline of Logstash nodes deployed as VMs and Kubernetes Pods.
Technical Requirements
Elastic Stack Expertise: Deep experience with Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, and Elastic Agent/Fleet.
Parsing & Transformation: Expert proficiency with Grok, Dissect, KV, JSON decoding, and Translate filters.
Environment Experience: Proven ability to support air-gapped artifact and package repositories and implement ingestion resiliency/failover strategies.
Data Sources: Experience ingesting logs from endpoints, network devices, cloud-native resources, Linux Audit, and Windows Event Logs.
Team Leadership: Ability to mentor team members by providing specialized data engineering training.
Additional Information
- Work Environment: This position requires being onsite 4–5 days per week.
- Clearance Growth: While a Secret clearance is required for certain tasks, there may be opportunities for clearance upgrades to the TS/SCI level based on mission requirements.
- Benefits: Very strong 401(k), family medical benefits, thousands of dollars in training budget and much more