Lead Platform Engineer

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. 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.

Lead Platform Engineer
Evansville, IN - Hybrid

• Hybrid/Onsite Requirement: 3 days per week
• Candidates must live within 50 miles of the OneMain corporate office in Evansville, IN. We will also consider candidates that live within 50 miles of OneMain corporate offices in Baltimore, MD; Wilmington, DE; Charlotte, NC; Irving, TX.

Note: MUST be legally authorized to work in the United States. 

The company is the country’s largest lending-exclusive financial company, proudly serving millions of customers with safe, affordable, and transparent installment loans. Customers turn to us every day—online and through more than 1,400 branches across 44 states—to help them take control of and improve their financial lives. For more than 100 years, our mission has remained the same: doing the right thing for our customers, employees, and communities.

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

• Administer, monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, and associated Elastic Stack components.
• Maintain highly available, secure, and resilient multi-node Elasticsearch clusters across cloud and on-premises environments.
• Monitor cluster health, node availability, indexing rates, search latency, JVM utilization, disk capacity, shard allocation, and data-ingestion performance.
• Diagnose and resolve issues related to cluster stability, data integrity, ingestion failures, query performance, resource utilization, and platform availability.
• Perform Elasticsearch and Elastic Stack upgrades, patching, configuration changes, and backward-compatible migrations with minimal service disruption.
• Manage index lifecycle policies, data streams, templates, mappings, aliases, retention requirements, snapshots, backup processes, and recovery procedures.
• Configure and support role-based access controls, authentication, encryption, audit logging, and other platform security capabilities.
• Support production incidents and participate in or lead high-severity incident response for Elastic-owned services.

Platform Design and Engineering

• Design and deploy scalable Elastic Stack solutions for centralized logging, application search, infrastructure monitoring, security analytics, and metrics use cases.
• Translate business and technical requirements into Elastic architecture and configuration designs.
• Develop indexing strategies, mappings, shard and replica configurations, node-role assignments, data-retention models, and capacity plans.
• Design and maintain Logstash pipelines, ingest pipelines, Beats or Elastic Agent integrations, and complementary data-processing workflows.
• Develop solutions that balance performance, reliability, scalability, security, operational complexity, and cost.
• Evaluate and implement Elastic features, plugins, integrations, and supporting technologies.
• Lead proof-of-concept efforts for capabilities such as machine learning, cross-cluster search, cross-cluster replication, data tiering, and advanced analytics.

Performance, Reliability, and Capacity Management

• Establish and maintain service-level objectives, availability targets, performance thresholds, and reliability metrics for Elastic platforms.
• Perform query optimization, indexing optimization, shard rebalancing, JVM tuning, pipeline tuning, and resource configuration.
• Conduct capacity planning based on ingestion volume, data growth, retention requirements, query patterns, and anticipated business demand.
• Identify platform bottlenecks and implement improvements that increase stability, performance, resilience, and operational efficiency.
• Develop dashboards, alerts, and reporting that provide visibility into platform health, capacity, service quality, and operational risk.
• Continuously improve backup, restoration, disaster-recovery, and business-continuity capabilities.

Automation and DevOps Integration

• Develop and maintain Infrastructure as Code using technologies such as Terraform and Ansible.
• Automate cluster deployment, configuration management, upgrades, validation, monitoring, access provisioning, and routine administrative activities.
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines that support Elastic platform components, configurations, dashboards, templates, and ingestion pipelines.
• Create automation and operational tooling using Python, Bash, APIs, or similar scripting technologies.
• Integrate Elastic platforms with cloud services, microservices, CI/CD tools, security platforms, and other observability technologies.
• Develop reusable templates, APIs, dashboards, documentation, and self-service capabilities for application and engineering teams.
• Identify manual processes that can be replaced with reliable, repeatable, and auditable automation.

Observability and Operational Excellence

• Maintain and improve centralized logging, metrics, dashboards, alerting, and operational analytics.
• Develop Kibana dashboards and visualizations for platform health, application performance, operational KPIs, and troubleshooting.
• Review alert quality and improve signal-to-noise ratios through threshold tuning, correlation, and automation.
• Create and maintain runbooks, operational procedures, architecture diagrams, troubleshooting guides, recovery documentation, and support standards.
• Participate in incident reviews and implement corrective actions to prevent recurrence.
• Promote reliability engineering, proactive monitoring, and continuous improvement across supported platforms.
• Support distributed tracing, application monitoring, and other observability capabilities as needed.

Technical Leadership and Collaboration

• Serve as the primary technical resource and subject-matter expert for Elasticsearch and the broader Elastic Stack.
• Partner with application development, architecture, security, cloud, networking, DevOps, and observability teams to deliver integrated platform solutions.
• Provide technical guidance on Elastic architecture, data ingestion, index design, performance, security, and operational practices.
• Review platform configurations, automation code, technical designs, and implementation plans.
• Communicate platform risks, capacity constraints, technical recommendations, and operational requirements to technical and nontechnical stakeholders.
• Adjust platform designs and services based on evolving business, regulatory, security, and product-team requirements.
• Assist with other platform engineering, cloud, CI/CD, automation, infrastructure, and operational responsibilities as team priorities require.

Mentorship and Continuous Improvement

• Mentor junior and mid-level engineers in Elastic administration, platform engineering, automation, observability, incident response, and DevOps practices.
• Provide code reviews, configuration reviews, design feedback, and hands-on technical enablement.
• Promote test-driven development, Agile delivery, documentation, repeatable automation, and engineering best practices.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and recommend improvements to platform architecture and operational processes.
• Help establish standards for platform reliability, security, maintainability, scalability, and supportability.

QUALIFICATIONS:
Required

• Demonstrated experience administering production Elasticsearch and Elastic Stack environments.
• Strong knowledge of Elasticsearch cluster architecture, node roles, shards, replicas, mappings, templates, aliases, data streams, and index lifecycle management.
• Experience configuring and supporting Logstash, Kibana, ingest pipelines, Beats, Elastic Agent, or similar data-ingestion technologies.
• Experience monitoring, troubleshooting, and tuning Elasticsearch cluster, indexing, search, and ingestion performance.
• Experience performing Elastic Stack upgrades, patching, migrations, backup, restoration, and disaster-recovery activities.
• Knowledge of Elastic Stack security, including authentication, authorization, role-based access control, encryption, and audit logging.
• Hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code and configuration-management technologies such as Terraform and Ansible.
• Experience developing automation using Python, Bash, APIs, or comparable scripting tools.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, source control, automated testing, and iterative delivery practices.
• Experience working with cloud platforms, on-premises infrastructure, or hybrid environments.
• Understanding of platform reliability, monitoring, alerting, incident response, capacity planning, and operational support.
• Ability to evaluate technical alternatives, recommend solutions, and guide implementation decisions.
• Strong analytical, troubleshooting, documentation, communication, and collaboration skills.
• Ability to work independently as a senior individual contributor while supporting and mentoring other engineers.

Preferred

• Experience with Elastic Cloud, Elastic Cloud Enterprise, or Elasticsearch deployments in AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
• Experience operating multi-zone, multi-region, or hybrid Elastic architectures.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes, containers, microservices, networking, and cloud-native infrastructure.
• Experience with cross-cluster search, cross-cluster replication, searchable snapshots, hot-warm-cold-frozen architectures, or data tiering.
• Experience with Elastic machine learning, application performance monitoring, distributed tracing, or security analytics.
• Familiarity with SRE and DevOps practices, including SLOs, error budgets, runbooks, release automation, and post-incident reviews.
• Experience supporting regulated, financial-services, or other highly controlled technology environments.
• Relevant Elastic, cloud, DevOps, or platform-engineering certifications.

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.
• The position may begin as a contract engagement with the potential for extension or conversion to full-time employment.
• Candidates must live within 50 miles of locations mentioned above to be considered for FTE conversion.

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.

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we are an organization that values diversity. We welcome applications from all qualified candidates, including minorities and persons with disabilities. 
 
reqOMF-REQ-0005781