Senior Manager, Staff Software Engineering

GEICO • Bethesda, MD

2d • $140,000 - $300,000

About The Position

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. Summary The Communications Services team is seeking an experienced Senior Manager with a passion for building high performance, low-latency communications platforms and applications. You will build and manage a team of engineers with a deep focus on delivering enterprise-wide solutions that operate in a highly performant and efficient way. You will help drive our insurance business transformation as we redefine experiences for our customers. Position Description The Communications Engineering department is responsible for creating high value, low friction interactions for our customers and partners. We are on a transformation journey to reshape communications across all contact channels. This position is charged with curating experiences for those that need to speak to any of our lines of business. We are in the process of modernizing our services and architecture across Amazon Web Services (AWS) with extreme focus on leveraging data and automation to transform experiences and drive efficiency. A Senior Manager is an engineering leader who works with the engineering staff to innovate and build new engineering solutions, improve and enhance existing solutions as well as leverage engineering solutions to solve critical operational problems. A Senior Manager will lead strategy and execution of a technical roadmap that will increase the velocity of delivering products and unlock new engineering capabilities. The ideal candidate has deep technical expertise to improve application performance, capacity benchmarking, increase availability and reliability, design and evolve cloud infrastructure.

Requirements

• Strong foundation in algorithms, data structures, and core computer science concepts
• Basic UI/UX, API, and prototype design; REST/JSON/XML and integrations with Amazon Connect contact flows, Lambda, and API Gateway
• Fluency with Python, Java, Go, .NET, JavaScript/TypeScript, XML, JSON, and RESTful web services
• OOP, design patterns, microservices, and frontend/backend unit testing (including backends invoked from Connect)
• Cloud concepts: SaaS, PaaS, IaaS; Amazon Connect as managed contact-center SaaS on AWS with IAM, VPC, and CloudWatch
• Fast learner; quick to adopt new AWS and Connect capabilities (routing, flows, Lex, etc.)
• Strong multi-cloud knowledge (AWS, GCP, Azure) with AWS depth: Connect, Lambda, S3, DynamoDB/RDS, SNS/SQS, EventBridge, CloudWatch, IAM, VPC
• Data modeling and architecture for analytics, reporting, and AI/ML; Connect CTRs and streaming/analytics pipelines (e.g., Kinesis) where applicable
• Scaled contact centers; Amazon Connect (queues, routing profiles, flows, tasks, outbound, Lex/Polly/Lambda integrations)
• Operational portals: AWS Management Console / Connect admin and Azure Portal
• Monitoring and performance: CloudWatch, X-Ray, dashboards/alarms, Connect queue and service metrics
• Metrics-driven prioritization: correlate drivers and outcomes (SLA, handle time, abandonment, system latency)
• MS Office (PowerPoint, Outlook, Word); Zoom and Slack
• Agile delivery; Jira, Azure DevOps, Portfolio
• Program management: MS Project, Visio, Excel
• Strong understanding of Site Reliability Engineering and DevOps principles
• Strong technical acumen in Cloud Architecture, Performance Benchmarking, and Capacity planning
• Experience with driving cultural change in technical excellence, quality, and efficiency
• Experience managing and growing technical leaders and teams
• Experience 8+ years with customer communications platforms, services, and software (e.g., contact center, omnichannel, CPaaS, or adjacent integrations).
• 6+ years hands-on coding experience.
• 5+ years building and operating software in a large-scale, mission-critical environment (reliability, incident response, change discipline).
• 5+ years managing and developing technical teams — hiring, coaching, performance conversations, capacity planning, and day-to-day prioritization — in addition to supervising personnel in technical operations or engineering settings.
• 5+ years technical / engineering management experience: owning roadmaps and delivery, cross-functional alignment with product and operations, and accountability for quality, timelines, and production health.
• 5+ years with a major public cloud (AWS preferred; GCP or Azure acceptable), including design, implementation, and operational ownership of cloud-based services.
• 2+ years with automated testing — unit, integration, and end-to-end functional tests — including standards and practices for teams you lead or oversee.

Responsibilities

• Work with your Director to address project dependencies, negotiate and estimate incremental delivery dates for milestones with the stakeholder community, and deliver projects on time
• Identify and raise appropriate project risks, in addition to presenting detailed and implementable solutions or alternatives
• Understand how requirements and design choices may impact systems across multiple areas
• Report on your team’s progress for project and other key metrics, in addition to presenting detailed and implementable ideas for areas to further improve or influence product or project delivery
• Initiate and support all aspects of performance management for team members - mentoring, performance and coaching plans, reviews, warnings, terminations, etc.
• Cultivate a culture that motivates all levels of performers to higher levels of achievement
• Foster a culture of growth mindset that acknowledges and expects individuals to grow and be accountable. Influence those you motivate and coach to be receptive to feedback.
• Identify where technical or analytical skill gaps put future team deliverables at risk and craft a plan to remediate, consistently challenge team members to share knowledge and learn new technologies
• Craft and deliver strategic and well-structured persuasive arguments to drive projects that drive process improvement, enhance cost leadership, and/or customer experience
• Develop the team budget and be accountable for reporting on results achieved at regular intervals
• Significantly contribute to the team planning process to include surfacing associate level proposals
• Collaborate with the product teams to understand their pain points around performance, resiliency and formulate strategies to address recurring issues in a sustainable way
• Influence and build vision with product owners to ship quality products in a faster pace
• Drive the team towards building solutions towards the long-term goals while ensuring that high priority tech debts are solved in an efficient way
• Consistently share best practices and improve processes within and across teams

Benefits

• 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.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Manager