Principal Cribl Engineer

Zachary Piper Solutions is seeking a cleared Principal Cribl Engineer to support a critical national security mission across multiple customer locations including Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling (JBAB), Washington, DC; College Park, MD; and Reston, VA. This is a senior-level engineering opportunity for a highly experienced technical leader who will serve as the principal authority for observability pipelines built on Cribl Stream and Cribl Edge. The ideal candidate will drive enterprise-scale logging and telemetry strategies, lead platform architecture, and support mission-critical data engineering and security operations environments.

Responsibilities of the Principal Cribl Engineer:

• Lead the architecture, design, and implementation of Cribl Stream and Cribl Edge solutions across multiple enclaves and data domains.
• Build and maintain high-throughput telemetry pipelines processing multi-terabyte daily workloads with advanced routing, filtering, enrichment, and replay capabilities.
• Optimize platform performance, worker topology, CPU and memory utilization, queue management, and transport mechanisms.
• Engineer secure data flows utilizing masking, tokenization, RBAC, PKI/TLS, and other governance and compliance controls.
• Integrate Cribl pipelines with SIEM and analytics platforms including Splunk, Elastic, cloud services, and SaaS telemetry ecosystems.
• Develop and implement high-availability (HA), disaster recovery (DR), reliability frameworks, health monitoring, and incident response processes.
• Create and maintain reusable Cribl Packs, engineering standards, operational runbooks, and best practices.
• Serve as the senior escalation point for complex Cribl-related issues and coordinate with vendor engineering teams as needed.
• Conduct technical design reviews, mentor engineers, and establish engineering excellence across the organization.
• Collaborate with security, cloud, infrastructure, and analytics teams to define observability and telemetry strategies.

Qualifications of the Principal Cribl Engineer:

• 10+ years of experience in logging, observability, SIEM, or related engineering disciplines.
• 5+ years of experience architecting and implementing enterprise-scale log and telemetry pipelines.
• 3+ years of hands-on experience supporting Cribl Stream and Cribl Edge in production environments.
• Demonstrated success scaling and operating observability platforms processing 5-10+ TB of data per day.
• Expert-level experience with Splunk ingestion, forwarding, indexing, and source type management.
• Strong Linux administration skills and scripting expertise using Python and Bash.
• Experience with Git, automation frameworks, and infrastructure-as-code tools such as Ansible and Terraform.
• Strong understanding of transport protocols including HTTP, TCP, TLS/mTLS, Kafka, and S3/object storage architectures.
• Experience designing secure data solutions utilizing encryption, secrets management, RBAC, and compliance-based controls.
• Demonstrated leadership experience mentoring engineers and driving technical decision-making.
• Cribl Certified Engineer (CCOE) certification or equivalent advanced Cribl expertise.
• Active TS/SCI Clearance with Polygraph required.

Required Certifications:

• (Security+ CE, CCNA Security, GSEC, SSCP, CySA+, GICSP, or CND), or ability to obtain within 30 days of hire.
• (CASP+ CE, CCNP Security, CISA, CISSP, GCED, or GCIH), or ability to obtain within 30 days of hire.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Expertise building and maintaining reusable Cribl Packs and standardized pipelines.
• Experience with AWS, Azure, hybrid cloud environments, and cross-domain data movement architectures.
• Knowledge of NIST, CIS Controls, and secure engineering best practices.
• Experience designing observability frameworks for large-scale distributed systems.
• Previous engagement with Cribl Professional Services, product teams, and vendor escalation processes.

Compensation of the Principal Cribl Engineer:

• Compensation: $180,000+ based on experience, certifications, and qualifications
• Full Benefits Package including Medical, Dental, Vision, 401(k), PTO, Paid Holidays, and additional company-sponsored benefits.

This job opens for applications on 07/13/2026. Applications for this job will be accepted for at least 30 days from the posting date.

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