Senior Elastic Platform Engineer

Senior Elastic Platform Engineer

Vantor is forging the new frontier of spatial intelligence, helping decision makers and operators navigate what's happening now and shape what's coming next. Vantor is a place for problem solvers, changemakers, and go-getters—where people are working together to help our customers see the world differently, and in doing so, be seen differently. Come be part of a mission, not just a job, where you can: Shape your own future, build the next big thing, and change the world.

To be eligible for this position, you must be a U.S. Citizen. This position requires an active U.S. Government security clearance, applicants who do not currently hold the required clearance will not be eligible for consideration. Employment for cleared roles is contingent upon verification of clearance status.

Export Control/ITAR: Certain roles may be subject to U.S. export control laws, requiring U.S. person status as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3).

We're looking for a Senior Elastic Platform Engineer to own and evolve our multi-domain Elastic environment supporting enterprise-scale data, observability, and analytics workloads.

This is not a ticket-driven support role: you'll be responsible for scaling, optimizing, and operating Elastic as a shared platform across multiple business domains, balancing performance, cost, data isolation, and reliability. You'll work at the intersection of DevOps, SRE, and data platform engineering to ensure Elastic remains a high-performing, trusted system under real-world pressure.

This role is onsite three days per week and based out of our Westminster, CO office. This role will occasionally be required to work from our Longmont, CO office.

What You'll Own

Platform Architecture & Scale

• Partner with engineering leads and architects to evolve Vantor's multi-tenant, multi-domain Elastic environments
• Make critical decisions on:
• cluster sizing and topology
• shard strategy and index design
• cross-cluster search and replication
• Optimize for performance, resiliency, and cost at scale

Data & Ingest Strategy

• Build and maintain ingestion pipelines (Beats, Logstash, Kafka, etc.)
• Define and enforce:
• index lifecycle management (ILM)
• data retention strategies
• mapping and schema governance
• Solve real-world problems like noisy data, mapping explosions, and high-ingest workloads

Reliability & Operations (SRE Mindset)

• Own the "ilities": availability, scalability, reliability, and maintainability
• Troubleshoot complex cluster issues:
• shard imbalance
• memory/heap pressure
• query latency
• Drive improvements proactively—not just react to incidents

Platform Engineering & Automation

• Treat Elastic as infrastructure-as-a-product
• Automate deployment and operations using:
• Terraform / Infrastructure-as-Code
• Kubernetes (EKS or similar) and Helm
• Build repeatable, scalable patterns for onboarding new teams and domains

Collaboration & Influence

• Partner with DevOps, Data Engineering, and application teams
• Help define standards, guardrails, and best practices for platform usage
• Act as a technical leader in shaping observability and data platform strategy while uplifting peers and colleagues along the way

What We're Looking For

Core Experience

• 6–10+ years in DevOps, SRE, or platform engineering
• Deep, hands-on experience operating Elasticsearch at scale, not just using Kibana but running clusters in production
• Proven experience supporting multiple teams or business domains on shared infrastructure

Elastic Expertise

• You've dealt with:
• shard sizing and rebalancing tradeoffs
• index lifecycle management (hot/warm/cold tiers)
• cross-cluster replication/search
• performance tuning (heap, GC, query optimization)
• data modeling and mapping strategy

DevOps / Platform Engineering Depth

• Strong experience with:
• Kubernetes and Helm
• Terraform or similar IaC tools
• CI/CD pipelines
• Proficiency in scripting (Python, Bash, or similar)
• Experience building and operating systems in AWS (EC2, S3, EKS, IAM, etc.)

Systems Thinking

• You think in systems, not tools
• You've designed solutions that balance:
• performance vs cost
• flexibility vs governance
• isolation vs shared infrastructure

Requirements

• U.S. Citizenship required
• Obtain U.S. Security Clearance at Secret level
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering/Science or equivalent experience

Bonus Points

• Experience with monitoring and observability ecosystems (Prometheus, Grafana, Zabbix)
• Background in SIEM or security analytics using Elastic
• Experience with large-scale data platforms or lakehouse architectures
• AWS or cloud certifications

Why This Role Is Different

• You'll own a real platform, not just maintain a cluster
• You'll solve multi-domain, enterprise-scale problems
• You'll have the autonomy to influence architecture, standards, and strategy
• You'll work alongside engineers who care about building systems the right way