Operational Telemetry / Analytics Engineer

eSense Incorporated; Washington (District of Columbia); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

eSense Incorporated seeks an Operational Telemetry / Analytics Engineer to design and maintain pipelines, dashboards, and analytics turning logs and metrics into actionable operational insight for incident detection and capacity planning.

Ideal candidates will have 5+ years in observability and strong skills in SPL/KQL/PromQL/SQL, Python, and enterprise platforms like Splunk, Elastic, and Datadog. This is a hybrid DC-based role requiring U.S. citizenship or green card.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in observability, monitoring or data engineering
• Hands-on dashboards and alerts in enterprise platforms
• Experience with ITIL/ITSM tools and DHS/NIST compliant environments

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain telemetry pipelines for logs, metrics, traces, and events
• Instrument apps with OpenTelemetry and standardize schemas
• Develop dashboards and real-time reports for operations and leadership
• Define SLIs/SLOs and generate availability and capacity reports
• Tune alerts to reduce noise and speed incident analysis
• Collaborate with NOC/SOC and engineering during incidents
• Ensure DHS 4300A, FISMA, OMB M-21-31 logging requirements

Skills

SPL

KQL

PromQL

SQL

Python

OpenTelemetry

Linux

Windows

Security+

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in CS / IT / Engineering

Tools

Splunk

Elastic

Datadog

Dynatrace

Fluentd

Logstash

Telegraf

Cribl

Prometheus

Grafana

Kibana

Power BI

Tableau

Kafka

Kinesis

Cribl Stream

Job description

We are seeking an Operational Telemetry / Analytics Engineer. The successful candidate will design, build, and maintain the pipelines, dashboards, and analytics that turn logs, metrics, traces, and events from a client environment into actionable operational insight, driving faster incident detection, root cause analysis, capacity planning, and service-level reporting. This role will report to the [Program Manager / Operations Lead]. The ideal candidate will be motivated by the opportunity to support public agencies, nonprofit organizations, and private companies in transforming their data into actionable insights. Candidate must be a U.S. citizen or green card holder able to obtain and maintain DHS suitability and must be able to work a hybrid schedule in our DC office.

What you will do:

• Design, build, and maintain telemetry pipelines that collect logs, metrics, traces, and events from applications, infrastructure, network devices, and cloud services.
• Instrument applications and services using OpenTelemetry or similar frameworks, and standardize data schemas, tagging, and naming conventions across sources.
• Ingest, parse, normalize, and enrich operational data in enterprise platforms (e.g., Splunk, Elastic, Datadog, Dynatrace, Azure Monitor, AWS CloudWatch).
• Develop dashboards, reports, and visualizations that give operations teams and government leadership real-time insight into system health, performance, and availability.
• Define and track service level indicators (SLIs), service level objectives (SLOs), and SLA metrics, and produce recurring availability, capacity, and performance reports.
• Build and tune alerting rules and thresholds to reduce noise and false positives, and correlate events to speed incident detection and root cause analysis.
• Apply statistical, trend, and anomaly detection analysis to identify emerging issues, capacity constraints, and opportunities for optimization.
• Partner with NOC, SOC, engineering, and application teams during major incidents and post-incident reviews, providing data-driven analysis of impact and root cause.
• Support FISMA, NIST SP 800-53, and DHS 4300A compliance, including audit logging and log retention requirements (e.g., OMB M-21-31), ATO evidence, and CDM reporting.
• Manage data volume, retention, and licensing costs through filtering, sampling, and tiered storage strategies.
• Automate data collection, report generation, and routine analysis with scripts, APIs, and infrastructure-as-code.
• Maintain documentation for data sources, pipelines, dashboards, runbooks, and SOPs.
• Other duties as assigned

Required Education:

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, data science, IT, engineering, statistics, or a related field; 9 + years of equivalent experience may be considered in lieu of a degree

Required Experience:

• 5 + years of experience in observability, monitoring, site reliability engineering, IT operations analytics, or data engineering
• Hands-on experience building queries, dashboards, and alerts in at least one enterprise observability or log analytics platform (e.g., Splunk, Elastic, Datadog, Dynatrace)
• Experience with ITSM tools (e.g., ServiceNow) and ITIL incident, problem, and change management
• U.S. citizenship or lawful permanent residency (green card), and ability to obtain and maintain a DHS suitability determination (Background Investigation) for the life of the contract. No security clearance is required

Required Skills:

• Proficiency in query languages such as SPL, KQL, PromQL, or SQL
• Scripting and data processing with Python (e.g., pandas) or similar, including working with REST APIs and JSON
• Strong understanding of logs, metrics, and traces, the OpenTelemetry standard, and collectors or agents such as Fluentd, Logstash, Telegraf, or Cribl
• Working knowledge of Linux and Windows systems, networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, DNS, SNMP, syslog), and cloud services
• Strong written and verbal communication for translating technical data into clear reports and briefings for non-technical stakeholders
• Active CompTIA Security+ (or equivalent) certification

Preferred:

• Prior experience supporting DHS or another federal civilian agency
• Active or recent DHS Background Investigation (suitability)
• Splunk Core Certified Power User or Admin, Elastic Certified Engineer, Datadog, or Dynatrace certification
• Experience with Prometheus, Grafana, Kibana, Power BI, or Tableau
• Familiarity with AWS GovCloud or Azure Government monitoring services and FedRAMP-authorized tools
• Experience with streaming and data pipeline technologies such as Kafka, Cribl Stream, or Kinesis
• Experience applying machine learning or AIOps techniques to anomaly detection and event correlation
• Knowledge of CDM, TIC 3.0, zero trust architecture, and OMB M-21-31 logging maturity requirements