Principal Elastic Platform Owner & Onsite Leader

Softility; Atlanta (GA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

A technology services company in Atlanta, GA is seeking a technical lead to manage the Elastic Stack and Kubernetes infrastructure. The ideal candidate will have 10+ years of experience, focusing on onsite operations, architectural reliability, and incident management. Responsibilities include overseeing platform stability, defining logging strategies, and mentoring engineering teams. Strong expertise in cloud-based environments and infrastructure-as-code practices is essential, along with experience in large-scale corporate operations.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in technical leadership roles.
• Expertise in Elastic Stack and Kubernetes for managing enterprise applications.
• Strong background in incident management and SRE practices.

Responsibilities

• Lead onsite operations for platform stability and manage engineering backlogs.
• Oversee Elastic Stack architecture deployed on Elastic Cloud.
• Design cluster topology for performance and cost-efficiency.

Skills

Elastic Stack

Kubernetes

Infrastructure-as-Code

Incident Management

CI/CD pipelines

Job description

Employment Type : Full-time

Experience : 10+ Years

Required Skills :

Technical Skills

• Elastic Expert : 5+ years of production experience with the Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash, Beats).
• Kubernetes Mastery : 3+ years managing Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK) or similar operators on enterprise K8s distributions (Anthos, GKE, or EKS).
• Ingest & Pipelines: Deep knowledge of log ingest architectures, index templates, sharding strategies, and cluster tuning.

Leadership & Experience

• Onsite Leadership : Proven ability to run day-to-day operations, manage technical rosters, and lead cross-functional troubleshooting sessions.
• Enterprise Scale : Experience supporting large-scale platforms (e.g., ETL jobs, microservices, anomaly detection) in a complex corporate environment.
• Incident Management : Familiarity with SRE practices, including incident response (P1-P3), MTTR tracking, and root cause analysis.

Preferred Skills

• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Helm) and CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab).
• Knowledge of migration strategies between legacy logging platforms (e.g., Splunk) and Elastic.

Responsibilities

Platform Architecture & Onsite Leadership

• Onsite Operational Lead : Act as the primary point of contact for platform stability. Manage daily stand‑ups, prioritize the engineering backlog, and coordinate between offshore and onsite teams.
• Architecture & Reliability : Own the Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Kibana, Ingest components) deployed on Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK).
• Capacity Planning : Design cluster topology (nodes, roles, zones) and manage resource quotas (CPU, Heap, Disk) to ensure cost‑efficiency and performance.
• SLO Management : Define and track Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for ingestion latency, search availability, and data retention.

Logging Strategy & Data Modeling

• Standardization : Define enterprise logging and index templates, including field conventions (service, environment, tenant, correlation IDs) to ensure reliable event correlation across the observability stack.
• Schema Design : Work with application teams to implement standardized mappings and Index Lifecycle Management (ILM) policies (Hot/Warm/Cold tiers, rollover, and retention).
• Data Quality : Own ingest patterns using Filebeat, Fluent Bit, Logstash, or Elastic Agent. Design parsing pipelines (JSON, Grok), enrichment logic, and dead‑letter queue strategies.

Kubernetes & Infrastructure Operations

• Cluster Management : Oversee daily health across Kubernetes‑based clusters (e.g., Anthos/GKE). Resolve pod‑level issues such as CrashLoopBackOffs, memory spikes, and disk usage alerts.
• Storage Operations : Lead the management and migration of Persistent Volume Claims (PVCs) for stateful sets, ensuring high availability during infrastructure upgrades.
• Security & Governance : Implement RBAC for indices and Kibana spaces. Enforce data governance and retention policies based on data classification (Infra logs vs. App logs vs. Sensitive data).

Observability & Enablement

• Self‑Service Enablement : Deliver Kibana dashboards and "Golden Queries" to support SRE and NOC teams in rapid incident triaging.
• Documentation & Runbooks : Author and maintain operational runbooks, disaster recovery scenarios, and "Self‑Help" guides for onboarding new log sources.
• Mentorship : Provide technical guidance and training sessions for platform engineers and application developers on effective search and logging practices.