Senior Staff Engineer

GEICO•Seattle, WA

3d•Remote

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. Location: Remote – US Level: Senior Staff Engineer Team: Fault Tolerance & Disaster Recovery The Role: We are seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer to provide technical leadership for fault‑tolerant orchestration at enterprise scale. This role operates at the intersection of architecture, reliability engineering, and organizational influence. You will be responsible not only for the technical evolution of our tool, but for shaping how GEICO designs, reasons about, and executes recovery workflows across hundreds of systems. This is a role for engineers who: Think in failure domains and impacted systems Design systems that behave predictably under stress Influence outcomes across organizations they do not manage See reliability as a design outcome, not an operational afterthought Scope & Impact At the Senior Staff level, success is measured by durable impact across the org, not individual delivery. You will define patterns, guide long‑term strategy, and ensure our tools scale technically and socially.

Requirements

10+ years of experience building and operating large‑scale distributed systems.
Deep expertise in fault tolerance, resilience, and recovery design.
Proven track record of org‑level technical leadership beyond a single team.
Strong ability to reason about and design for partial failure.
Experience shaping shared platforms or frameworks used by many teams.

Nice To Haves

Experience with durable execution, or workflow orchestration
Hands‑on experience designing recovery, failover, or disaster‑recovery workflows.
History of working through adoption challenges for platform teams.
Ability to translate low‑level technical risks into clear business and reliability outcomes.

Responsibilities

Enterprise Technical Leadership: Own the long‑term technical direction for our tools as GEICO’s orchestration platform for failover, rebuild, and restore workflows.
Define and evolve orchestration patterns that scale across diverse application architectures and maturity levels.
Make architectural tradeoffs balancing reliability, operability, and adoption cost.
Serve as the top‑level technical escalation point for complex orchestration and recovery failures.
Fault Tolerance & Resilience Strategy: Establish clear standards for modeling failure, retries, timeouts, and compensations.
Drive consistency in how teams design and execute recovery workflows.
Identify systemic reliability risks and lead cross‑org initiatives to mitigate them.
Partner with SRE, infrastructure, and platform teams to align our tools with enterprise reliability goals.
Organizational Influence & Enablement: Influence teams that do not report to you through clear technical reasoning and trusted leadership.
Set expectations and contracts between our tools and provider systems to clarify ownership of failures.
Mentor Staff and Senior engineers in distributed systems thinking and fault‑tolerant design.
Act as a technical ambassador for our tools with leadership and peer orgs.
Platform Stewardship: Help balance feature development, adoption support, and production stability with your teams capacity.
Ensure our tools remains reliable, observable, and operable as usage expands.