Staff Software Engineer

Staff Software Engineer

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.

GEICO is seeking an experienced software engineer with a passion for building high-performance, low maintenance, zero-downtime platforms, and applications. You will help drive our insurance business transformation as we transition from a traditional IT model to a tech organization with engineering excellence as its mission, while co-creating the culture of psychological safety and continuous improvement.

Our Staff Software Engineer works with the team and the broader org to innovate and build new systems, improve, and enhance existing systems and identify new opportunities to apply your knowledge to solve critical problems. You will lead and own the strategy and execution of a technical roadmap that will increase the velocity of delivering products and unlock new engineering capabilities. The ideal candidate has a deep understanding of technology, risk management, site reliability engineering principles, and strategic planning to design and implement resilient systems that safeguard our business from potential threats.

As a Staff Software Engineer, you will:

• Develop and drive the overall strategy for the Data Safeguard organization, aligning it with the organization's business goals and objectives.
• Provide thought leadership in Data Safeguard, staying ahead of industry trends and emerging technologies to enhance our backup/restore posture.
• Conduct comprehensive risk assessments to identify potential threats and vulnerabilities.
• Design and implement robust strategies to ensure data safety, integrity, and correctness.
• Lead the design and architecture of resilient and scalable systems, considering both on-premises and cloud-based solutions.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to integrate data safeguard best practices into the development and deployment processes.
• Develop and maintain comprehensive incident response plans to address various disaster scenarios on our backup/restore systems.
• Conduct regular simulations and drills to ensure the readiness of the organization in the event of a disaster.
• Hands-on software engineering and SDLC best practices (Technical Review Documents, Architecture, Software Development, Software Reviews, Testing, Production Readiness Reviews, among others).
• Evaluate, select, and implement cutting-edge technologies and tools to enhance our data safeguard capabilities including but not limited to processes, compliance, and visibility.
• Stay current with industry best practices and emerging technologies to continuously improve our data safeguard capabilities.
• Work closely with executive leadership, tech teams, and other stakeholders to communicate the importance of data safeguarding and foster a culture of resilience.
• Act as a trusted advisor, providing guidance on backups/restores and security of data, matters to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Be a role model and mentor, helping to coach and strengthen the technical expertise and know-how of our engineering and product community. Influence and educate executives.
• Analyze cost and forecast, incorporating them into business plans.
• Determine and support resource requirements, evaluate operational processes, measure outcomes to ensure desired results, and demonstrate adaptability and sponsoring continuous learning.

Qualifications:

• Fluency in at least one modern language (Go/Python preferred).
• Understanding compression algorithms, deduplication, encryption, and error correction.
• Understanding of SQL and NoSQL databases, including stateful services management and storage.
• Understanding of networking, caches, key/value stores, load balancing, global load balancing, queues, DNS, and CDN.
• Deep knowledge of SRE practices, methodologies, and principles, along with a solid understanding of on-prem and public cloud-based network, compute, and storage technologies.
• In-depth knowledge of hybrid cloud architecture, IaaS and PaaS technologies, container orchestration platforms (e.g., Kubernetes), cloud efficiency, and observability, etc.
• Strong background in incident management.
• Ability to create incident response playbooks, runbooks, incident triaging strategies, and post-incident analysis to drive continuous improvement in system reliability and availability.
• Experience with open-source management and monitoring tools.
• Experience with infrastructure automation, tooling, and configuration management frameworks (e.g., Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Pulumi, Terraform, etc.).
• Familiarity with cloud security best practices and compliance standards.
• Excellent leadership skills with a passion for mentoring and fostering professional growth.
• Strong problem-solving and analytical abilities, with a keen eye for detail and a passion for driving operational excellence.
• Visionary thinker with the ability to anticipate future challenges and opportunities.
• Exceptional leadership and communication skills.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving capabilities.
• Proven track record of successfully leading and building software in large and complex organizations.

Experience:

• 8+ years of professional experience in software development.
• 6+ years of experience with architecture and design and working on open-source frameworks.
• 4+ years of experience with AWS, GCP, Azure, or another cloud service.

Education:

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or related field, or equivalent experience.

Annual Salary: $115,000.00 - $230,000.00. 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