Staff Engineer

Government Employees Insurance Company; Bethesda (MD); On-site; USD 110,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

GEICO is seeking a Staff Engineer in Bethesda, MD to lead incident management tooling and drive reliability across critical services. You will partner with SRE, platform, and security teams to reduce downtime and improve on-call processes.

The role emphasizes hands-on leadership in incident analysis, architecture, and continuous improvements, with opportunities to shape engineering culture and operational practices at GEICO.

Qualifications

• Hands-on proficiency in Go, Java, Python, and C# for production-grade apps.
• Experience with SQL and NoSQL databases and cloud-native services.
• Experience building data pipelines, analytics, and dashboards (Spark, Trino, Grafana, Superset, Power BI).
• Experience with OpenTelemetry and observability platforms (Grafana, Datadog, Splunk, Azure Monitor).
• Experience with incident management platforms such as PagerDuty.
• 8+ years of professional software engineering; 6+ years in architecture and reliability leadership.
• 3+ years with cloud providers (Azure, AWS, GCP) or equivalent in hybrid environments.

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve enterprise-critical platforms and automate incident management, on-call, paging, and troubleshooting.
• Build shared services, APIs, data contracts, automation, and integrations across teams.
• Lead design reviews and guide troubleshooting strategy with cross-team coordination.
• Lead post-incident reviews, root-cause analysis, and systemic reliability improvements.
• Develop and maintain incident response strategies, runbooks, and resilience practices.
• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, promoting ownership and operational excellence.

Skills

Go

Java

Python

C#

Kubernetes

Cloud platforms

CI/CD

Observability concepts

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related

Tools

Knative

Grafana

Datadog

Splunk

Azure Monitor

PagerDuty

Claude Code

Cursor

GitHub Copilot

Job description

Why Join GEICO?

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 on relentless innovation to exceed our customers' expectations while making a real impact on local communities nationwide. Founded in 1936, GEICO is a member of the Berkshire Hathaway family of companies and one of the largest auto insurers in the United States. 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.

Position Summary

Technology Operations Center is at the core of GEICO’s application and platform resiliency. It assists GEICO’s engineering teams with maintaining high availability of our customer and internally facing services while driving down time to detect and recover from incidents. It is governing our incident management processes and builds platforms that allow GEICO to manage and recover from incidents. 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 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 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.

Why This Role Is Different

This role blends deep technical understanding, hands-on execution, and the ability to build software with real-time incident leadership and platform and process improvements. You will help drive our incident management and response processes and the platforms that automate them. You will shape how GEICO service engineering teams detect, manage, resolve, and learn from incidents. Your work directly impacts the availability of GEICO’s critical applications and platforms and the experiences and satisfaction of millions of customers and tens of thousands of associates.

Position Responsibilities

As a Staff Engineer, you will:

• 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 operational risk across teams.
• Apply and help advance 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 and implement modern technologies and tools that improve platform capability, compliance, visibility, reliability, and engineering effectiveness.
• Serve as a Technical Leader During Incidents: Act as a technical leader and escalation point during high‑severity incidents, bringing sound 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 materially contribute to 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 technical leaders, business stakeholders, and non‑technical audiences.
• Mentor senior and mid‑level engineers through technical leadership, example, code and design reviews, documentation, and operational coaching.
• Reinforce a culture of ownership, accountability, continuous improvement, psychological safety, learning, and operational excellence.

Qualifications

• Hands‑on proficiency in multiple languages, including Go, Java, Python, and C#, for building production‑grade full‑stack applications on Kubernetes and serverless technologies such as Knative in Azure and AWS.
• Experience with SQL and NoSQL technologies and cloud‑native services for storing and analyzing incident data.
• Experience building and using data pipelines, analytics, and dashboards for operational metrics, trends, and KPIs using technologies such as Spark, Trino, Grafana, Superset, and Power BI.
• Experience with OpenTelemetry and observability platforms such as Grafana, Datadog, Splunk, and 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 through automation, data, and cross‑team collaboration.
• Strong incident forensics and root cause analysis skills, with the ability to improve 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 decisions in complex distributed systems and influence architecture across multiple teams.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to coach engineers and present findings clearly to leadership.
• Experience8+years of professional software engineering experience, preferably in platform engineering, reliability engineering, backend engineering, distributed systems, or operational tooling.
• 6+ years of experience with architecture, design, system reliability, scalability, and technical leadership for production systems.
• 4+ years of experience with open‑source frameworks, modern engineering practices, or platform technologies.
• 3+ 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.
• Education Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or equivalent education or work experience.

Additional Job Requirements

• 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.

Annual Salary

Annual Salary $110,000.00 - $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.

GEICO Pledge

Great Company: Protecting customers through life’s twists and turns with innovation and integrity. Great Careers: Personalized development programs, mentorship, and certification assistance. Great Culture: Inclusive and collaborative culture rooted in shared success. Great Rewards: Competitive pay, benefits, and flexibility to support your well‑being and future.

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 qualifications for the job to be filled. GEICO reasonably accommodates qualified individuals with disabilities to enable them to receive equal employment opportunity and/or perform the essential functions of the job, unless the accommodation would impose an undue hardship to the Company. This applies to all applicants and associates. GEICO also provides a work environment in which each associate is able to be productive and work to the best of their ability. We do not condone or tolerate an atmosphere of intimidation or harassment. We expect and require the cooperation of all associates in maintaining an atmosphere free from discrimination and harassment with mutual respect by and for all associates and applicants.

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 on relentless innovation to exceed our customers’ expectations while making a real impact on local communities nationwide. Founded in 1936, GEICO is a member of the Berkshire Hathaway family of companies and one of the largest auto insurers in the United States.

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