Senior Staff Engineer

GEICO•Bethesda, MD

About The Position

GEICO is seeking an experienced SRE Software Engineer with a passion for building, operating and troubleshooting high-performance, low-maintenance, zero-downtime complex distributed platforms and applications. You will help drive our transformation to a tech organization with engineering excellence and site reliability as its mission, by defining, implementing and operating our incident management processes and in-house technology platforms that automate them. This role focuses on improving Incident Management tooling and process across GEICO. It is a hands-on technical leadership role focused on better incident management, faster time to detect, troubleshoot and recover from incidents and fewer repeat incidents, by designing, developing and operating the the tools and processes that help all GEICO engineering teams manage their on-call, runbooks, troubleshooting and BCDR. Success in this role requires strong technical depth and equally strong process leadership. The right candidate can go deep on incident analysis, system behavior, and architecture, while also improving how teams run COEs, learn from incidents, and turn those lessons into engineering improvements. This role blends deep technical understanding, hands on execution and ability to build SW with real time incident leadership, platform and process improvements. You will be driving our incident management and response processes and the platforms that automate them. You are shaping how GEICO service engineering teams detect, manage, resolve and learn from the incidents. Your work directly impacts the availability of GEICO’s critical applications and platforms, experiences and satisfaction of millions of customers and tens of thousands of associates.

Requirements

Hands on proficiency in multiple languages, including Go, Java, Python, C# for building production-grade full stack applications on Kubernetes and serverless technologies (KNative) in Azure and AWS.
Experience with SQL and NoSQL technologies and cloud-native services for storing and analyzing incident data.
Experience with building and using data pipelines analytics, and dashboards for operational metrics, trends, and KPIs using technologies such as Spark, Trino, Grafana, Superset, PowerBI
Experience with OpenTelemetry and observability platforms such as Grafana, Datadog, Splunk, Azure Monitor.
Experience with incident management platforms such as PagerDuty.
Proficiency with AI assisted development processes and tools such as Claude Code, Cursor and GitHub Copilot.
Experience improving incident, post incident review, or reliability processes at scale through automation, data, and cross-team influence.
Deep incident forensics and root cause analysis skills, with the ability to raise COE quality through clear action items and follow-through across teams.
Strong understanding of observability, reliability engineering, incident management, and post-incident improvement practices.
Experience supporting incident response and high-severity production incidents in complex environments.
Strong software engineering fundamentals and system design skills, with experience building reliable production systems at scale.
Ability to lead technical design and architecture decisions in complex distributed systems.
Strong communication skills and the ability to coach engineering teams and present findings clearly to leadership.
10+ years of professional software engineering experience, preferably in platform engineering, reliability engineering, backend engineering, distributed systems, or operational tooling.
8+ years of experience with architecture, design, system reliability, scalability, and technical leadership for production systems.
6+ years of experience with open-source frameworks, modern engineering practices, or platform technologies.
4+ years of experience with Azure, AWS, GCP, or another cloud service provider, or equivalent experience in complex hybrid environments.
Demonstrated ownership of mission-critical systems operating in 24x7 production environments.
Ability to influence engineering outcomes across teams in complex organizations.
Must be able to communicate in a clear, concise, professional oral and written manner with customers, clients, co-workers, leadership, and other employees of the organization.
Must be able to perform effectively under pressure and in stressful situations, including during production support and high-severity incident response.
Must be able to participate in a 24x7 on-call rotation for incident response and production support of mission-critical platforms.

Nice To Haves

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or equivalent education or work experience.

Responsibilities

Own and Evolve Enterprise-Critical Platforms: Design, develop and operate automation, self-service tools, dashboards, and data pipelines that automate and scale our incident management, on-call, paging and troubleshooting processes.
Build shared services, APIs, data contracts, automation, and integrations that standardize incident response and reduce systemic operational risk.
Set and uphold engineering standards across design, implementation, deployment, testing, observability, security, operational support, and production readiness.
Champion safe deployment, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, automated testing, rollback patterns, and operational controls that support frequent and reliable delivery.
Evaluate, select, and implement modern technologies and tools that improve platform capability, compliance, visibility, reliability, and engineering effectiveness.
Serve as a Senior Technical Authority During Incidents: Act as a technical leader and escalation point during high-severity incidents, bringing architectural judgment, system-level problem solving, and calm execution under pressure.
Guide troubleshooting strategy, cross-team coordination, impact analysis, and risk-based decision making to restore service safely and efficiently.
Lead or heavily influence post-incident reviews, root cause analysis, corrective action planning, and systemic reliability improvements.
Develop and maintain incident response strategies, operational runbooks, readiness criteria, triage models, and resilience practices across multiple integration points.
Influence Technical Direction and Engineering Culture: Lead complex design and architecture reviews spanning multiple teams, services, dependencies, and operational domains.
Partner with SRE, platform, product, infrastructure, security, and business stakeholders to align operational tooling with practical engineering needs and enterprise reliability goals.
Translate technical concepts, risks, and tradeoffs clearly for executives, technical leaders, and non-technical stakeholders.
Mentor senior engineers, staff engineers, and teams through technical leadership, example, code/design reviews, documentation, and operational coaching.
Reinforce a culture of ownership, accountability, continuous improvement, psychological safety, learning, and operational excellence.