ESI Recovery Specialist – Email & IM Data (Remote)

Softthink Solutions; Washington (District of Columbia); Remote; USD 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Softthink Solutions seeks an ESI Specialist to perform hands-on recovery, repair, conversion, loading and reconstruction of email and instant message data within an isolated, remote environment for government archival purposes.

You will work with PST/OST repair, data parsing, and migration into a staging repository, ensuring accuracy and generating statistics for reporting in line with NARA guidance.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of relevant experience with email and instant messages in a Microsoft environment.
• Hands-on experience with PST and OST repair, forensic recovery, carving and conversion tools.
• Experience with Exchange, Outlook, Teams and Skype for Business data structures.
• Experience preparing accuracy checks, counts and statistics for data sets of up to 250 GB to 500 GB across 100 to 140 containers.

Responsibilities

• Manipulate, load and convert ESI, in particular email and instant messages in a Microsoft environment.
• Search network and cloud storage spaces made available by PCLOB IT to identify relevant data files, and load the data into an existing Microsoft environment.
• inventory and process the files the Government stages, and record the source, custodian and storage location of each file in support of the A04 report.
• confirm that collected OST and PST files are readable and not corrupt. Identify and repair corrupt or incomplete OST and PST files to recover missing or hidden message data, including header corruption that needs binary repair or block-level carving. Parse orphaned and unindexed OST files.
• Convert OSTs to PSTs and verify that each resulting PST is a complete representation of the OST data.
• Ensure accuracy of data conversion and loading by performing and documenting quality and accuracy checks.
• generate ESI statistics for each OST and PST, including item types, item counts, first and last item dates by type, and date and time distribution charts, to support the A05 report.
• migrate OST and PST content into PCLOB's agency-furnished isolated staging repository, applying custodian tracking and duplicate handling per NARA guidance (A06).
• determine whether Skype and Teams instant message data exists in cloud storage, network folders, backups and other locations, count messages and date ranges by user (A07), and consolidate and format recovered IM data into NARA-compliant preservation containers.
• reconstruct email records user by user for the custodians the Government selects and record the work in the Reconstructed Email Records Log (A08).
• Prepare electronic exports for archiving purposes, including NARA-compliant PST outputs.
• Run all contractor-supplied software offline inside the staging virtual machine, with no internet connection or license call-home.
• Work only in the isolated, read-only environment. There is no direct access to live production Exchange Online or enterprise backup systems.
• Provide input to the Gap Analysis (A09), recommendations (A10) and training recommendations (A11).
• Follow PCLOB Rules of Behavior and "least privilege" access rules and safeguard all Government property.

Job description

Softthink Solutions seeks an ESI Specialist to perform hands-on recovery, repair, conversion, loading and reconstruction of email and instant message data within an isolated, remote environment for government archival purposes.

You will work with PST/OST repair, data parsing, and migration into a staging repository, ensuring accuracy and generating statistics for reporting in line with NARA guidance.