Distinguished Engineer - Business Continuity, Governance, and Platform Resilience

Overview

At GEICO, we offer a rewarding career where your ambitions are met with endless possibilities.

Every day we honor our iconic brand by offering quality coverage to millions of customers and being there when they need us most. We thrive through relentless innovation to exceed our customers’ expectations while making a real impact for our company through our shared purpose.

When you join our company, we want you to feel valued, supported and proud to work here. That’s why we offer The GEICO Pledge: Great Company, Great Culture, Great Rewards and Great Careers.

Position Summary

GEICO is seeking an experienced Distinguished Engineer with a passion for building high-performance, low maintenance, zero-downtime platforms and applications. You will help drive our enterprise transformation by establishing engineering excellence as a core mission, with a specific focus on organizational resilience, strategic risk management, and rigorous technical governance. This role demands mastery of reliability, availability, software engineering, and best practices in BCDR.

Position Description

Our Distinguished Engineer works with Principal and Senior Engineers to innovate and build new systems, dramatically improve, and enhance existing systems, and identify new opportunities to apply deep knowledge to solve critical enterprise problems. You will lead the technical strategy and execution of a roadmap that increases product delivery velocity while ensuring absolute platform resilience. The ideal candidate has a deep understanding of technology, risk management, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles, and strategic planning to design and implement resilient systems that safeguard our business from potential threats, enforce organizational compliance, and ensure predictable operation.

Position Responsibilities

As a Distinguished Engineer, you will:

Enterprise Resilience and BCDR Strategy

This domain focuses on establishing the core requirements for enterprise survival and recovery from major disruptions. The Distinguished Engineer is responsible for driving the technical BCDR strategy, ensuring it aligns with critical business and regulatory goals. This involves conducting comprehensive risk assessments, leading the architecture of highly resilient systems (embedding BCDR early in the design phase), and defining organization-wide Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) metrics. A key accountability is validating these recovery targets by overseeing regular BCDR simulations and Chaos Engineering programs.

Governance, Standards, and Architectural Oversight

The role is centered on institutionalizing technical excellence across the organization. The Distinguished Engineer serves as a key leader within the Architecture Review Board , setting and rigorously enforcing architectural standards, policies, and blueprints. Responsibilities include ensuring that all major technology investments are strategically aligned with business objectives and compliance requirements, enforcing domain consistency across architecture layers, and driving strategic modernization efforts to maximize scalability and coherence.

Operational Excellence and Case Management

This function transitions strategic resilience into operational reality, leveraging Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles. The Distinguished Engineer leads the SRE strategy by establishing and monitoring Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and error budgets to effectively balance feature velocity with mandatory stability. Key duties include developing and maintaining comprehensive incident response plans, runbooks, and playbooks, driving automation to achieve low Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) , and analyzing post-incident results to eradicate architectural flaws that drive down Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) .

Leadership and Strategic Influence

As the senior technical individual contributor, the Distinguished Engineer is tasked with deep organizational and financial influence. The role requires acting as a trusted advisor to executive stakeholders on resilience and governance matters, while simultaneously serving as a role model and mentor to coach senior and principal engineering talent. Finally, the DE analyzes cost and forecast data, playing a critical role in strategic financial stewardship, particularly in Cloud Spend Optimization related to stateful services and data persistence.

Qualifications

• Fluency and specialization in software development and best practices using modern programming languages.

• Deep knowledge of SRE practices, methodologies, and principles, along with a solid understanding of cloud-based compute, network, and storage technologies.

• Strong background in incident management (a core function of Case Management in platform operations), including the ability to create incident response playbooks, runbooks, and perform rigorous post-incident analysis to drive continuous improvement in reliability and availability.

• Expertise in distributed systems architecture, replication topologies, and distributed consistency patterns to meet stringent RTO and RPO requirements.

• Understanding of SQL and NoSQL databases, including stateful services management, storage, and optimization strategies for resilience and cloud cost efficiency.

• In-depth knowledge of hybrid cloud architecture, IaaS and PaaS technologies, container orchestration platforms (e.g., Kubernetes), and cloud efficiency.

• Experience with infrastructure automation, tooling, and configuration management frameworks (e.g., Ansible, Terraform).

• Exceptional leadership and communication skills, with a passion for mentoring and fostering professional growth.

• Visionary thinker with the ability to anticipate future challenges and opportunities in resilience and governance.

• Proven track record of successfully leading, designing, and delivering complex engineering projects in large and complex organizations.

Experience

• 12+ years of professional software development experience

• 10+ years of experience with architecture and design

• 6+ years of experience in open-source frameworks

• 6+ years of experience with AWS, GCP, Azure, or another cloud service

Education

Bachelor\'s degree in computer science, Information Systems, or equivalent education or work experience.

Annual Salary

$140,000.00 - $300,000.00

The above annual salary range is a general guideline. Multiple factors are taken into consideration to arrive at the final hourly rate/ annual salary to be offered to the selected candidate. Factors include, but are not limited to, the scope and responsibilities of the role, the selected candidate’s work experience, education and training, the work location as well as market and business considerations.

At this time, GEICO will not sponsor a new applicant for employment authorization for this position.

The GEICO Pledge:

Great Company: At GEICO, we help our customers through life’s twists and turns. Our mission is to protect people when they need it most and we’re constantly evolving to stay ahead of their needs.

We’re an iconic brand that thrives on innovation, exceeding our customers’ expectations and enabling our collective success. From day one, you’ll take on exciting challenges that help you grow and collaborate with dynamic teams who want to make a positive impact on people’s lives.

Great Careers: We offer a career where you can learn, grow, and thrive through personalized development programs, created with your career – and your potential – in mind. You’ll have access to industry leading training, certification assistance, career mentorship and coaching with supportive leaders at all levels.

Great Culture: We foster an inclusive culture of shared success, rooted in integrity, a bias for action and a winning mindset. Grounded by our core values, we have an established culture of caring, inclusion, and belonging, that values different perspectives. Our teams are led by dynamic, multi-faceted teams led by supportive leaders, driven by performance excellence and unified under a shared purpose.

As part of our culture, we also offer employee engagement and recognition programs that reward the positive impact our work makes on the lives of our customers.

Great Rewards: We offer compensation and benefits built to enhance your physical well-being, mental and emotional health and financial future.

• Comprehensive Total Rewards program that offers personalized coverage tailor-made for you and your family’s overall well-being.
• Financial benefits including market-competitive compensation; a 401K savings plan vested from day one that offers a 6% match; performance and recognition-based incentives; and tuition assistance.
• Access to additional benefits like mental healthcare as well as fertility and adoption assistance.
• Supports flexibility- We provide workplace flexibility as well as our GEICO Flex program, which offers the ability to work from anywhere in the US for up to four weeks per year.

The equal employment opportunity policy of the GEICO Companies provides for a fair and equal employment opportunity for all associates and job applicants regardless of race, color, religious creed, national origin, ancestry, age, gender, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, familial status, disability or genetic information, in compliance with applicable federal, state and local law. GEICO hires and promotes individuals solely on the basis of their qualifications for the job to be filled.

GEICO reasonably accommodates qualified individuals with disabilities to enable them to receive equal employment opportunity and/or perform the essential functions of the job, unless the accommodation would impose an undue hardship to the Company. This applies to all applicants and associates. GEICO also provides a work environment in which each associate is able to be productive and work to the best of their ability. We do not condone or tolerate an atmosphere of intimidation or harassment. We expect and require the cooperation of all associates in maintaining an atmosphere free from discrimination and harassment with mutual respect by and for all associates and applicants.