Data Engineer (ELK)

Red River; O'Fallon (IL); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Red River is seeking a highly skilled Data Engineer to design, build, and maintain scalable data pipelines at Scott Air Force Base, supporting the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA). The role emphasizes ingestion, processing, and analytics for reporting while upholding DoD security standards.

You will work with Kafka, Elastic Stack, AWS, and Kubernetes, delivering Kibana dashboards and data-driven insights.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in a related field.
• Minimum 5 years in data engineering, data warehousing, or related.
• Active DoD Secret Clearance and Security+ certification required.
• Experience with DoD networks and security standards (STIGs).
• Experience with Kafka, Spark, NiFi, Hadoop, Elasticsearch, Logstash, Databricks, ELK Stack.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain scalable data systems and pipelines for analytics and reporting.
• Unify data from multiple networks into a consistent platform with data quality and security.
• Implement solutions using Kafka, Elastic Stack, AWS, and Kubernetes, with Kibana visualizations.
• Develop data warehouses/lakes to support analytics and dashboards.
• Optimize ingestion throughput, query performance, and storage efficiency.
• Automate ETL/ELT processes and support CI/CD pipelines.

Skills

Big data pipelines

Kubernetes

Kafka

Elasticsearch

Pipelines optimization

CI/CD

Communication

Education

Bachelor’s degree in CS/IT/Engineering

Tools

Kafka

Spark

NiFi

Hadoop

Elasticsearch/ELK

Logstash

Databricks

Kubernetes

Job description

We are seeking a highly skilled and motivated Data Engineer Software Developer to join our team at Scott Air Force Base, supporting the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA).

The successful candidate will play a crucial role in designing, developing, and implementing solutions. As well as maintaining visualizations to support data analytics and reporting requirements. This position requires a deep understanding of data visualization principles, strong analytical skills, and the ability to work collaboratively in a fast-paced environment.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Designs, builds, and maintains scalable, reliable data systems and pipelines to ingest, process, and transform large, complex, and disparate data sources for analytics and reporting.
• Unifies and integrates data from multiple network operations systems into a consistent, accessible platform, ensuring data quality, accuracy, security, and compliance with DoD and DISA requirements.
• Implement solutions using Confluent Kafka, Elastic Stack, AWS, and Red Hat OpenShift (Kubernetes), including creating Kafka, Elastic, and Logstash pipelines and supporting Kibana visualizations and dashboards with React, JavaScript, and HTML.
• Develops and manage data warehouses and data lakes to support analytics, reporting, and operational dashboards, optimizing infrastructure for performance, scalability, and cost-effectiveness through automation and best practices.
• Continually analyze and optimize ingestion throughput, query performance, indexing strategies, and storage efficiency across Elastic and Kafka platforms.
• Automates data-related tasks such as ETL/ELT processes, data validation, cleansing, monitoring, and supports CI/CD pipelines for automated build, test, and deployment.
• Collaborates with data analysts, visualization engineers, and other stakeholders to deliver integrated, actionable data solutions, and documents data architecture, integration patterns, and operational procedures.
• Troubleshoots and resolves issues related to data ingestion, processing, and platform performance, storage, memory, partitioning, and cluster performance.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field or equivalent experience.
• Minimum of 5 years of experience in data engineering, data warehousing, or a related field.
• Active DoD Secret Clearance and current Security+ certification is required.
• Experience with DISA, DISN, or other DoD network environments, including developing and deploying software applications that meet DoD security standards (e.g., STIGs), and knowledge of network security, encryption, and access controls in classified environments.
• Experience with big data technologies and platforms such as Kafka, Spark, NiFi, Hadoop, Elasticsearch, Logstash, Databricks, and ELK Stack for text mining, summarization, search, and entity extraction.
• Experience with cloud-based data platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP, AWS GovCloud), cloud-integrated platforms, and infrastructure as code, including networking and security policies.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes deployment, platform upgrades, patching, configuration management tools (Ansible, Puppet, Chef), and monitoring, alerting, and observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, Elastic).
• Experience with BI tools like Kibana and developing and maintaining technical documentation and runbooks.
• Strong understanding and practical experience with Agile methodologies (Scrum, SAFe), and related tools such as Atlassian JIRA and Confluence.
• Certified Confluent Developer and Certified Elastic Engineer.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with experience working remotely with geographically dispersed teams and within a matrixed organization to combine software, integration, and data engineering practices.
• Apply knowledge of system architecture, networks, and centralized logging (ELK) to support data transformation initiatives.

Basic Qualifications:

• U.S. Citizenship Required

Red River offers a competitive salary, excellent benefits and an exceptional work environment. You can review our benefit offerings here.

EOE M/F/DISABLED/Vet

Red River is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment. Discrimination or harassment based upon any protected characteristics as defined by state or federal law is wholly inconsistent with our company values and will not be tolerated.

In order to ensure reasonable accommodation for individuals protected by Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Act of 1974, and Title I of the American’s with Disabilities Act of 1990, applicants that require accommodation in the job application process may contact [e-mail]. PLEASE NOTE: This contact channel is reserved for use by individuals with disabilities who require special accommodations in order to submit an expression of interest in a position within Red River.