Senior QRadar Platform Engineer

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SUMMARY: The customer is seeking a Senior QRadar Platform Engineer to serve as the overall owner of their IBM QRadar platform — responsible not only for day-to-day administration but for infrastructure health, architecture, integrations, roadmap planning, engineering leadership, and the platform's overall operational success. This is a hands-on role accountable for the stability, performance, scalability, and strategic direction of the QRadar ecosystem, working in partnership with the customer's security team.

The ideal candidate is an expert QRadar practitioner with deep, hands-on production experience across the full platform who can independently perform any engineering, administration, architecture, or troubleshooting task — and who also leads: setting technical direction, mentoring the SIEM team, and stepping in to teach, delegate, and assist whenever needed.

This is a staff augmentation role, anticipated to be for 3 months and then renewable on a month-to-month basis starting as soon as possible.

HIERARCHY: Reports to Engagement Manager

PRIMARY DUTIES:

System health & monitoring Own the overall health of the QRadar deployment, including all collection devices (event and flow collectors, data gateways, and processors). Proactively identify and remediate current issues affecting log collection and keep the environment stable.

Log ingestion & source onboarding Onboard new log sources and resolve log ingestion issues as they arise — configuring parsing, DSMs, and log source extensions as needed — and validate that events are collected, parsed, and normalized correctly.

Performance analysis & tuning Investigate and resolve performance issues affecting critical components. Tune indices, review event/flow pipeline throughput, address EPS/FPM constraints, and optimize the environment so searches and rules run efficiently at scale.

Data retention & optimization Analyze what's currently being collected and retained, and work with stakeholders to identify data that can be reduced, re-routed, or dropped — trimming noise and storage cost without losing security value.

Dashboards & content Build dashboards and reports, and partner with security engineers to optimize the underlying database, searches (AQL), and saved queries for both speed and usefulness.

Patching & maintenance Apply software patches and updates to keep the system current, secure, and supported.

Enablement Onboard new users, manage access, and develop initial training materials to bring the internal team up to speed on the environment.

Architecture & resilience Own QRadar architecture and infrastructure — including High Availability and Disaster Recovery design, capacity planning, and storage / EPS-FPM growth — to keep the platform scalable, resilient, and aligned to retention and compliance requirements.

Roadmap & platform strategy Establish and maintain the strategic roadmap for the platform, evaluating new QRadar capabilities, integrations, and modernization opportunities that align with the organization's security objectives.

Team leadership & mentoring Lead, mentor, and delegate across the SIEM team — setting technical direction, serving as the top escalation point for complex issues, and staying hands-on to teach and assist wherever needed.

COMPETENCY:

Demonstrated hands-on experience as a QRadar engineer or architect operating a production deployment

Working knowledge of QRadar architecture — Console, Event/Flow Collectors and Processors, Data Nodes, and app host components

Proven experience onboarding log sources and troubleshooting log collection, parsing, and normalization (DSMs, log source extensions, custom properties)

Experience diagnosing and resolving QRadar performance issues, including index management and search/pipeline tuning

Comfort writing and optimizing AQL and building dashboards, saved searches, and reports

Solid grounding in log management, network protocols, and common log source types (Windows, Linux/syslog, firewalls, cloud, etc.)

REQUIRED EDUCATION: None

EXPERIENCE: Minimum of 7 years in IT Security; 5 years of QRadar experience

Required Qualifications:

Expert-level experience designing, implementing, administering, and optimizing enterprise-scale IBM QRadar deployments

Demonstrated hands-on experience serving as the primary QRadar engineer, architect, or technical lead supporting large-scale production environments.

Accountable for platform architecture, operational stability, performance, scalability, and strategic direction of the QRadar ecosystem.

Experience developing and maintaining QRadar standards, operational procedures, and engineering best practices across the organization.

Deep expertise in QRadar platform architecture and infrastructure management

Comprehensive understanding of QRadar distributed architectures including Consoles, Event Processors, Event Collectors, Flow Processors, Flow Collectors, Data Nodes, App Hosts, High Availability configurations, and Disaster Recovery architectures.

Ability to design scalable, resilient, and high-performance deployments that meet organizational growth, retention, compliance, and operational requirements.

Experience planning infrastructure capacity, storage utilization, EPS/FPM growth, system expansion, and hardware refresh cycles.

Ownership of all QRadar integrations and log source onboarding

Extensive experience integrating and maintaining a diverse set of log sources including Windows, Linux, Active Directory, Microsoft 365, Azure, AWS, GCP, Palo Alto, Cisco, Check Point, F5, CrowdStrike, EDR/XDR platforms, IDS/IPS, vulnerability scanners, cloud-native security tools, and custom applications.

Advanced proficiency troubleshooting ingestion issues, event parsing, DSM functionality, custom extensions, Universal DSMs, custom properties, log source extensions, protocol configurations, and event normalization.

Ability to lead integration efforts across multiple security and infrastructure teams while ensuring data quality and consistency.

Subject matter expert in QRadar performance optimization and platform health

Responsible for ongoing monitoring and maintenance of overall platform health, resource utilization, event processing rates, search performance, storage management, and system stability.

Advanced experience diagnosing and resolving EPS bottlenecks, Ariel database issues, indexing inefficiencies, event pipeline constraints, search latency, application performance concerns, and infrastructure-level issues.

Develops proactive monitoring, health-check procedures, and capacity planning processes to ensure platform availability and performance.

Advanced AQL, analytics, reporting, and content development expertise

Expert-level knowledge of Ariel Query Language (AQL) including optimization, troubleshooting, and advanced reporting techniques.

Experience creating executive dashboards, SOC operational dashboards, detection metrics, compliance reporting, and cus