Lead Platform Engineer (SRE)

Job Title : Lead Platform Engineer (SRE)

Location: Baltimore, MD(Onsite)

Duration: 12+ Months

Job Description:

• Our customers turn to us every day - online and at over 1,400 branches in 44 states - to help them take control and improve their financial lives.
• It's all about doing the right thing - a mission that hasn't changed for more than 100 years.
• You will serve as the subject-matter expert (SME) for Elasticsearch in a DevOps environment, ensuring high availability, performance, security, and compliance across cloud and on-prem deployments.
• Collaborating with architecture, development, security, and operations teams, you will drive scalability, automate workflows, and enable data-driven applications while maintaining operational excellence in an Agile delivery model.

Key Responsibilities

• Platform Design & Development
• Architect and deploy scalable Elasticsearch solutions for search, observability, and logs/metrics analytics use cases.
• Design and implement ELK/Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) and complementary pipelines.
• Create and manage multi-node clusters across availability zones in cloud and/or on-prem environments.
• Translate business requirements into technical designs, including indexing strategies, shard allocation, and data modeling

Operations & Support

• Monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot ELK/Elastic environments & Elasticsearch clusters for performance, stability, and data integrity.
• Perform performance tuning namely query optimization, indexing pipelines and shard rebalancing.
• Conduct capacity planning, configuration management, and continuous improvement via metrics, alerts, and automation.
• Execute version upgrades, patching, and backward-compatible migrations with minimal downtime.

Automation & DevOps Integration

• Build and maintain Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/Ansible), CI/CD pipelines, and automation scripts (Python, Bash, etc...).
• Integrate Elasticsearch with cloud providers, cloud-native services, and other opensource observability tools.
• Enable self-service capabilities for development teams via APIs, templates, and dashboards

Collaboration & Enablement

• Partner with DevOps, Security, and AppDev teams to integrate Elasticsearch into microservices, CI/CD, and monitoring workflows.
• Provide expert guidance, code/config reviews, and lightweight scripting to accelerate feature delivery.
• Create and maintain runbooks, architecture diagrams, KPIs dashboards (Kibana), and troubleshooting guides.

Innovation & Continuous Improvement

• Evaluate and adopt new Elastic features, plugins, and ecosystem tools.
• Lead proof-of-concepts for advanced use cases (machine learning, cross-cluster replication etc ).
• Identify automation opportunities and drive platform resilience initiatives.

Mandatory Skills:

• 3-5+ years of hands-on experience Elasticsearch administration in enterprise environments
• Proven track record designing and deploying ELK/Elastic Stack at scale
• Expert in Elasticsearch architecture: nodes, shards, replicas, indexing, search, aggregations, APIs
• Proficiency in scripting/automation: Python, Bash, Ansible; Go or Java a plus
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform) and container orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker)
• Solid grasp of distributed systems, networking, and storage (EBS, GP3, etc.)
• Experience with automation and scripting (Python, Bash, Terraform, Ansible, or similar)
• Deep knowledge of system performance tuning, incident management, and root cause analysis
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines (GitHub,Gitlab) and DevOps best practices
• Excellent problem-solving and communication skills.

Desired Skills:

• Elastic Certified Engineer or Elastic Certified Observability Engineer
• Certifications in AWS (Solutions Architect/Developer) and/or Azure (Azure Administrator/Solutions Architect/Devops).
• Experience migrating elasticsearch cluster from on-prem to cloud [AWS/Azure/ESS]
• Knowledge of security and compliance monitoring in cloud environments
• Background in software development or SRE