Senior QRadar Platform Engineer Job Philadelphia area,Pennsylvania USA,Manufacturing / Production

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…