ELK - DevOps/SRE Lead

Role Overview

We are looking for a senior-level ELK DevOps / SRE Lead to take ownership of an enterprise Elasticsearch platform supporting critical workloads for a major US financial institution.

This role combines deep Elasticsearch engineering expertise with DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering responsibilities. The person in this position will be accountable for cluster architecture, performance optimization, platform stability, automation, and long-term scalability — operating within a highly regulated banking environment.

This is not a dashboard-focused or entry-level ELK role.

We are looking for someone who has designed, scaled, and stabilized large production clusters, led migrations, and can operate confidently within a structured DevOps and SRE model in a regulated financial services environment.

Requirements

Core Elasticsearch (Must Have):

• 5+ years hands-on Elasticsearch in enterprise production
• Cluster sizing, shard allocation, node roles & scaling
• Index Lifecycle Management (ILM) & data streams
• Query performance tuning & search profiling
• Elasticsearch migrations & version upgrades
• Kibana — alerting, dashboards, ML anomaly detection
• Logstash pipelines — Grok, Painless, ingest enrichment
• Elastic Agent & Fleet for centralized agent management

Cloud & Infrastructure (Must Have):

• Microsoft Azure — AKS, Azure VMs, Azure Monitor
• Docker & Kubernetes (AKS specifically)
• Elastic Cloud on Azure deployment & management
• Azure Active Directory (AAD) — SAML/SSO integration
• Terraform & Ansible for infrastructure as code
• CI/CD pipelines for Elasticsearch deployments

Automation & Integration (Must Have):

• Python scripting using elasticsearch-py client
• OpenTelemetry (OTEL) — SDK instrumentation & Collector
• REST API integration for Elasticsearch administration
• Elasticsearch Watcher for automated alerting
• Dynatrace, LogicMonitor, or PagerDuty familiarity

Security & Compliance (Must Have):

• Elasticsearch RBAC & audit logging configuration
• TLS encryption for data in transit & at rest
• PII/PHI masking & data classification in pipelines
• SOC 2 or HIPAA compliance awareness
• Elasticsearch security in regulated environments

SRE Practices (Must Have):

• SLI / SLO / SLA definition & tracking
• P1 incident handling & root cause analysis
• MTTR reduction using correlated logs/metrics/traces
• Capacity planning & proactive scaling
• Operational runbook development

Education:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience)

Preferred Certifications:

• Elastic Certified Engineer
• Elastic Certified Observability Engineer
• Elastic Certified Analyst
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate or Azure DevOps Engineer Expert

Preferred Experience:

• Experience in financial services, banking, or other regulated enterprise environments.
• Exposure to large-scale data ingestion pipelines using Kafka, Filebeat, or Fluentd.
• Experience with Apache Airflow or similar workflow orchestration tools.
• Familiarity with Microsoft Sentinel or other SIEM platforms for security monitoring.
• Experience with Prometheus and Grafana for supplementary metrics observability.