Senior Associate - Elasticsearch Engineer
Location Designation: Hybrid - 3 days per quarter Role Overview As part of Technology, you'll have the opportunity to contribute to groundbreaking initiatives that shape New York Life's digital landscape. Leverage cutting-edge technologies like Generative AI to increase productivity, streamline processes, and create seamless experiences for clients, agents, and employees. Your expertise fuels innovation, agility, and growth — driving the company's success. The Elasticsearch Engineer will work on a team supporting the day-to-day operation, performance, and reliability of the enterprise Elasticsearch platform that serves as the core of our security data lake. This is a mid-level engineering role (3–5 years of experience) embedded within the Security Data Platform team, focused on Elasticsearch cluster operations, ingest pipeline development, and data architecture. What You’ll Do: The engineer will be responsible for managing a large Elasticsearch 9.x cluster environment, building and maintaining ingest pipelines that normalize high-volume security log sources to Elastic Common Schema (ECS), designing and tuning index templates and data stream lifecycles across hot/warm/cold/frozen tiers, and ensuring the platform meets performance SLAs and compliance-driven retention requirements. This role works closely with the log routing layer (Cribl) and the SOC engineering team. What You’ll Bring • Hands-on experience operating and troubleshooting multi-node Elasticsearch clusters (40+ nodes) including shard allocation, recovery tuning, backpressure diagnosis, and node-level resource management • Strong understanding of Index Lifecycle Management (ILM) policies across hot/warm/cold/frozen tiers, including searchable snapshots and frozen-tier index restoration workflows • Experience building and maintaining ingest pipelines using native Elasticsearch processors (grok, set, rename, convert, script, pipeline chaining) with a preference for processor-based approaches over Painless where possible • Working knowledge of Painless scripting for ingest-time field transformations, conditional logic, and data normalization • Proficiency with index templates, component templates, and data stream architecture — including understanding of mapping conflicts, dynamic templates, and failure store indices • Familiarity with Elastic Common Schema (ECS) field mapping conventions and how to apply them to security log sources during ingest • Experience with data stream rollovers, reindexing operations, and mapping migration strategies for live production data • Ability to write and optimize ES|QL and KQL queries for security use cases, and build/maintain Kibana dashboards and data views • Experience monitoring and tuning search performance including slow query log analysis, shard sizing strategies, query profiling, and understanding the impact of mapping choices (keyword vs text, doc_values, subobjects) on query efficiency • Familiarity with cluster health and performance monitoring via Kibana Stack Monitoring and Devtools for diagnosing allocation and performance issues Preferred / Nice-to-Have • Experience with cross-cluster search (CCS) and remote cluster configuration in multi-cluster architectures • Familiarity with Terraform-managed Elasticsearch resources (roles, API keys, index templates, data views) • Exposure to Cribl Stream or similar log routing/transformation platforms feeding into Elasticsearch via HEC or Elasticsearch output • Understanding of compliance-driven data retention requirements (e.g., NY DFS, NAIC) and how they map to ILM/tier policies • Experience with Elastic Security app, detection rules, or security-focused Kibana content • Experience with Elastic Cloud cost management including deployment sizing, autoscaling behavior, data tier cost optimization (hot vs frozen storage economics), and identifying savings opportunities through shard consolidation, ILM tuning, or field reduction at ingest • Understanding of capacity planning — forecasting storage and compute needs based on ingest rates, retention requirements, and query workload patterns #LI-CD2 Pay Transparency Salary Range: $124,000-$177,000 Overtime eligible: Exempt Discretionary bonus eligible: Yes Sales bonus eligible: No Actual base salary will be determined based on several factors but not limited to individual’s experience, skills, qualifications, and job location. Additionally, employees are eligible for an annual discretionary bonus. In addition to base salary, employees may also be eligible to participate in an incentive program. Company Overview At New York Life, our 180-year legacy of purpose and integrity fuels our future. As we evolve into a more technology-, data-, and AI-enabled organization, we remain grounded in the values that drive lasting impact. Our diverse business portfolio creates opportunities to make a difference across industries and communities—inviting bold thinking, collaborative problem-solving, and purpose-driven innovation. Here, you’ll find the rare balance of long-standing stability and forward momentum, supported by an inclusive team that honors tradition while embracing progress. As a Fortune 100 mutual company, we offer a place to grow your skills, contribute to meaningful work, and deliver solutions that matter. Your ideas drive what’s next, and your growth powers it. Our Benefits We provide a full package of benefits for employees – and have unique offerings for a modern workforce, including leave programs, adoption assistance, and student loan repayment programs. Based on feedback from our employees, we continue to refine and add benefits to our offering, so that you can flourish both inside and outside of work. Click here to discover more about our comprehensive benefit options or visit our NYL Benefits Site. Our Commitment to Inclusion At New York Life, fostering an inclusive workplace is fundamental to who we are and how we serve our communities. We have a longstanding commitment to creating an environment where individuals can contribute their best and succeed together. This foundation is rooted in our core values of humanity and integrity, ensuring that every employee feels valued and supported. By embracing a broad range of perspectives and experiences, we achieve greater success and fulfill our promise of providing financial security and peace of mind to families across all communities. Click here to learn more about New York Life’s leadership in this space. Recognized as one of Fortune’s World’s Most Admired Companies, New York Life is committed to improving local communities through a culture of employee giving and volunteerism, supported by the Foundation. We're proud that due to our mutuality, we operate in the best interests of our policy owners. To learn more about career opportunities at New York Life, please visit the Careers page of www.NewYorkLife.com. Visit our LinkedIn to see how our employees and agents are leading the industry and impacting communities. Visit our Newsroom to learn more about how our company is constantly evolving to meet our clients' and employees’ needs. Job Requisition ID: 93721