Senior Staff Engineer

Position Summary  

​​GEICO is seeking an experienced Senior Staff 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.​ 

Position Description 

Our Senior Staff Engineer works with our Manager, Principal and Sr. Engineers 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 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. 

Position Responsibilities 

​​As a Senior Staff 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, IT 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 and specialization in software development and best practices using modern programming languages such as Go and Python 

• ​Understanding of backup strategies (e.g., 3-2-1) 

• ​Understanding of 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 

• ​Detail-oriented and a drive for operational excellence 

• ​Visionary thinker with the ability to anticipate future challenges and opportunities 

• ​Excellent communication skills 

• ​Strong analytical and problem-solving capabilities 

• ​Proven track record of successfully leading and building software in large and complex organizations​ 

Experience 

• ​​10+ years of professional experience in software engineering  

• ​8+ years of experience with architecture and design 

• ​6+ years of experience in open-source frameworks 

• ​4+ 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