Staff Engineer – PaaS Messaging/Kafka (Remote)

GEICO; Kansas City (MO); Remote; USD 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

An established industry player is seeking a Staff Engineer to join their PaaS Messaging team. This role focuses on building high-performance, low-maintenance platforms while driving transformation in the insurance sector. The ideal candidate will have deep expertise in open-source messaging and event streaming, with a strong background in Kafka, Pulsar, and ActiveMQ. You will collaborate with senior engineers to innovate and improve existing systems, ensuring quality and performance. This is a fantastic opportunity to influence engineering strategies and contribute to a culture of continuous improvement in a forward-thinking environment.

Qualifications

• Deep hands-on experience in complex system design and data pipelines.
• Proficiency in at least one OOP language such as Java, Go, or Python.
• Experience with open-source messaging platforms like Kafka and Pulsar.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical thought leadership across multiple areas of the enterprise.
• Collaborate with product managers and engineering teams to solve complex problems.
• Mentor and coach engineers while sharing best practices across teams.

Skills

System Design

Data Pipelines

Open-source Messaging

Event Streaming

Java

Python

CI/CD Pipelines

Terraform

Monitoring Tools

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science

Tools

Kafka

Pulsar

ActiveMQ

RabbitMQ

Grafana

Prometheus

Terraform

Ansible

Job description

GEICO is seeking an experienced Staff Engineer to join our PaaS Messaging team. This team focuses on building high-performance, low-maintenance, zero-downtime platforms and applications. The role involves driving our insurance business transformation by transitioning from a traditional IT model to a technology organization committed to engineering excellence and fostering a culture of psychological safety and continuous improvement.

In this role, you will collaborate with Distinguished and Senior Engineers to innovate, build new systems, improve existing ones, and identify new opportunities to apply your expertise to solve critical problems. You will lead the strategy and execution of a technical roadmap to increase product delivery velocity and unlock new engineering capabilities. The ideal candidate has deep expertise in open-source messaging and event streaming domains, with proven experience in Kafka, Pulsar, and/or ActiveMQ.

As a Staff Engineer, your responsibilities include:

1. Providing technical thought leadership across multiple areas of the enterprise.
2. Collaborating with product managers, team members, customers, and other engineering teams to solve complex problems.
3. Developing and executing technical strategies for the Platform Engineering domain.
4. Ensuring the quality, usability, and performance of solutions.
5. Mentoring and coaching engineers and influencing leadership.
6. Sharing best practices and improving processes across teams.
7. Analyzing costs, forecasting, and incorporating these into business plans.
8. Supporting resource requirements, evaluating operational processes, and demonstrating adaptability.
9. Participating in on-call and operational support.

Qualifications:

1. Deep hands-on experience in complex system design, data pipelines, and scalable distributed systems.
2. Proficiency in at least one OOP language such as Java, Go, Python, or C++.
3. Experience with open-source messaging and event streaming platforms like Kafka, Pulsar, ActiveMQ, or RabbitMQ, including understanding of concepts like Topic Scaling, Partitions, and Consumer Groups.
4. Experience building Kafka Connectors or related tooling.
5. Ability to design, experiment, and influence engineering and product roadmaps.
6. Experience transitioning research to production environments.
7. Knowledge of CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure as code tools like Terraform or Ansible is a plus.
8. Knowledge of monitoring tools like Grafana and Prometheus is a plus.
9. Familiarity with other messaging solutions like Azure Service Bus and Azure Event Hub is a plus.

Experience:

1. 6+ years of professional experience.
2. 4+ years in open-source frameworks.
3. 3+ years in architecture and design.
4. 3+ years with cloud services like AWS, GCP, or Azure is preferred.

Education:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or equivalent experience.