Staff Engineer - Applied AI

GEICO; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 110,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

GEICO is seeking a Staff Engineer, Applied AI to shape how Generative AI enhances customer and associate experiences across the enterprise. This senior individual contributor role emphasizes hands-on delivery of scalable, production-ready AI systems.

You will lead the design and deployment of AI agents, knowledge graphs, and orchestration across high-value workflows, collaborating with product and engineering teams while mentoring others on AI and agent-based workflows.

Qualifications

• 8 or more years of professional software engineering or applied machine learning experience, including 2+ years with Generative AI in production
• Experience adding intelligence to internal processes and workflows to improve efficiency, automation, and decision-making
• Track record of improving system reliability and scalability through architectural improvements and performance optimization
• Experience building scalable, secure, and maintainable production systems

Responsibilities

• Identify opportunities to automate business processes using AI and intelligent workflows
• Architect, build, and deploy applied AI solutions across enterprise workflows
• Design and implement AI agents and agentic workflows
• Build scalable, resilient systems with high availability and performance
• Collaborate with cross-functional partners to translate business needs into technical designs
• Mentor engineers and scientists in AI, LLMs, and agent-based design
• Drive innovation by exploring new models and reasoning techniques
• Lead architecture discussions and guidelines across multiple teams
• Run rigorous experimentation and evaluation in production environments
• Establish engineering best practices for reliability, safety, governance, and monitoring

Skills

Applied AI

Generative AI

Distributed systems

Knowledge graphs

Agent architectures

Workflow orchestration

Retrieval-augmented generation

Vector databases

Tools

Spring AI

LangChain4j

Embabel

Job description

GEICO is seeking a Staff Engineer, Applied AI to help shape how Generative AI enhances customer and associate experiences across the enterprise. This is a senior, hands‑on individual contributor role for someone with deep technical expertise, strong collaboration skills, and a proven ability to deliver scalable, resilient, production‑ready AI systems.

What You Will Do

• Identify and evaluate opportunities for automating business processes using AI, intelligent workflows, and agent‑based systems.
• Architect, build, and deploy applied AI solutions across high‑value enterprise workflows including automation, document intelligence, decision support, and intelligent assistants.
• Design and implement AI agents and agentic workflows that orchestrate tools, APIs, reasoning steps, and business logic to automate complex processes at scale.
• Build systems and services that meet high standards for scalability, resilience, performance, and availability.
• Use knowledge graphs to enhance reasoning, entity relationships, context retrieval, and multi‑step workflows.
• Collaborate with product, engineering, operations, and analytics partners to co‑create scalable AI solutions and translate business needs into technical designs.
• Mentor engineers and scientists who want to develop AI and agentic workflow skills through coaching, pairing, reviews, and architectural guidance.
• Drive innovation by exploring new models, frameworks, and reasoning techniques and applying them creatively to real‑world challenges.
• Lead through technical influence by providing guidance on architecture, experimentation, and deployment across multiple teams.
• Run rigorous experimentation and evaluation including hypothesis definition, measurement, validation, and iterative improvement in production environments.
• Establish and model engineering best practices for reliability, interpretability, safety, governance, and monitoring of production AI systems.

What We Are Looking For (Must Have)

• 8 or more years of professional software engineering or applied machine learning experience, including 2 or more years working with Generative AI or LLM‑based systems in production.
• Experience adding intelligence to internal processes and workflows to improve efficiency, automation, and decision‑making.
• Track record of improving system reliability and scalability through architectural improvements, performance optimization, and infrastructure enhancements.
• Proven experience building scalable, resilient, secure, and maintainable products and systems that run reliably in production.
• Strong understanding of agent architectures, workflow orchestration, retrieval‑augmented generation, vector databases, and knowledge graph integration.
• Ability to collaborate deeply across teams and co‑create solutions with engineers, product managers, and domain experts.
• Experience mentoring engineers and helping others grow in AI, LLM, and agent‑based system design.
• A history of delivering measurable business outcomes from AI systems.
• Strong competency in distributed systems, service design, performance optimization, and reliability engineering.

Nice to Have

• Experience building advanced Generative AI capabilities including domain‑tuned LLMs, vector reasoning techniques, or specialized retrieval architectures.
• Experience with insurance, financial services, or other regulated industries.
• Experience deploying AI components in Java ecosystems including Spring AI, LangChain4j, or Embabel.
• Background in document intelligence, fraud or anomaly modeling, or complex ontology and knowledge graph design.
• Familiarity with AI safety practices, evaluation frameworks, monitoring, and regulatory compliance.
• Ability to effectively communicate complex technical topics to senior leadership and non‑technical stakeholders.

Who You Are

• A collaborative engineer who works well with cross‑functional partners and supports the growth of those around you.
• A hands‑on builder who ships reliable, scalable, production‑grade systems rather than stopping at proof of concept.
• Someone who understands how to design systems that scale smoothly, recover gracefully, and operate reliably under load.
• An innovative thinker who explores new approaches, tools, and architectures and applies them thoughtfully.
• A natural mentor who enjoys helping others develop AI, LLM, and agentic workflow skills.
• A systems thinker who can connect LLMs, vector search, agents, and knowledge graphs into cohesive solutions.
• Driven by real‑world impact, customer value, and long‑term engineering excellence.

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.

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.