Staff Engineer - API-First Java & Microservices Leader

Jobtailor; Edison (NJ); On-site; USD 190,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

GEICO is seeking a senior technical leader to provide cross-area technical leadership and enterprise-level thought leadership. You will collaborate to solve challenging problems and deliver high-quality services and software across domains.

You will design and develop APIs/microservices using GraphQL, gRPC, Java, Python, and Kafka with API-first principles, and work across frontend, API tiers, and backend domain services. Strong leadership and security protocol experience are required.

Qualifications

• Design, experiment, and influence engineering direction and product roadmap.
• Partner with engineering teams; transition research to production.
• API-first engineering, service orchestration, event-driven, real-time APIs (GraphQL, gRPC).
• Manage schema evolution, versioning, and high-performance API systems.
• Deliver resilient event-driven and messaging-based solutions at scale with low latency.
• Build complex SaaS systems in large-scale business contexts.
• Deep knowledge of Docker and Kubernetes.
• Java plus another modern language (C#, C++, Python) and OO design.
• Experience leading full-stack application and service development.
• Understanding of MySQL and PostgreSQL open-source DBs.
• Strong NoSQL foundation (Cosmos, Cassandra, Apache Trino).
• Able to thrive in a fast-paced, startup-like environment.
• Design architecture, patterns, reliability, and scaling.
• Implement security protocols (AD, Windows auth, SAML, OAuth).

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership to multiple areas and thought leadership to the enterprise.
• Collaborate across teams to solve challenging problems.
• Deliver high-quality services and software for varied domains.
• Be accountable for quality, usability, and performance of solutions.
• Design and develop APIs and microservices with API-first design (GraphQL, gRPC).
• Use Java, C#, SQL and NoSQL databases across stacks.
• Deploy in a hybrid cloud using Kubernetes and cloud-native tools.
• Work on end-to-end solutions across frontend, API, and backend domains.
• Mentor and coach engineering and product communities.
• Influence and educate executives on technical strategy.
• Lead the strategy and execution of a technical roadmap modernizing servicing with API-first design.

Skills

Technical Leadership

Collaboration

Mentoring

Influencing Executives

Problem Solving

Tools

Kubernetes

Docker

Kafka

MySQL

PostgreSQL

Cosmos

Cassandra

Apache Trino

Active Directory

OAuth

Job description

GEICO is seeking a senior technical leader to provide cross-area technical leadership and enterprise-level thought leadership. You will collaborate to solve challenging problems and deliver high-quality services and software across domains.

You will design and develop APIs/microservices using GraphQL, gRPC, Java, Python, and Kafka with API-first principles, and work across frontend, API tiers, and backend domain services. Strong leadership and security protocol experience are required.