Staff Engineer – PaaS Messaging/Kafka (Remote)

GEICO; Washington (District of Columbia); Remote; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

An established industry player is seeking a Staff Engineer to join their PaaS Messaging team. This role involves driving innovation in high-performance platforms and applications, focusing on engineering excellence and continuous improvement. You will collaborate with senior engineers to enhance product delivery and develop technical strategies. The ideal candidate will have deep expertise in open-source messaging and event streaming, with a strong background in Kafka, Pulsar, and ActiveMQ. This is an exciting opportunity to shape the future of technology in the insurance sector, making a significant impact on the organization's transformation journey.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of professional experience in engineering roles.
• Deep hands-on experience in complex system design and data pipelines.
• Experience with cloud services like AWS, GCP, or Azure.

Responsibilities

• Lead the strategy and execution of technical roadmaps.
• Collaborate with teams to solve complex problems and enhance product delivery.
• Mentor engineering teams and influence leadership.

Skills

Open-source messaging expertise

Kafka

Pulsar

ActiveMQ

Java

Go

Python

C++

CI/CD

Analytical problem-solving

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science

Tools

GIT

Jenkins

CircleCI

SonarQube

Terraform

Ansible

Grafana

Prometheus

Job description

GEICO is seeking an experienced Staff Engineer to join our PaaS Messaging team. This team is dedicated to building high-performance, low-maintenance, zero-downtime platforms and applications. You will help drive our insurance business transformation as we transition from a traditional IT model to a tech organization focused on engineering excellence, fostering a culture of psychological safety and continuous improvement.

In this role, you will collaborate with the Distinguished Engineer 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 technical expertise in open-source messaging and event streaming domains, with proven experience in Kafka, Pulsar, and/or ActiveMQ.

As a Staff Engineer, you will:

• Provide technical thought leadership across multiple areas of the enterprise
• Collaborate with product managers, team members, customers, and other engineering teams to solve complex problems
• Develop and execute technical strategies for the Platform Engineering domain
• Ensure the quality, usability, and performance of solutions
• Mentor and role model, helping to enhance the technical expertise of our engineering and product teams, and influence leadership
• Share best practices and improve processes within and across teams
• Analyze costs and forecasts, integrating them into business planning
• Determine resource needs, evaluate operational processes, measure outcomes, and support continuous learning
• Participate in on-call and operational support

Qualifications:

• Deep hands-on experience in complex system design, data pipelines, architectures, and scalable distributed systems
• Proficiency in at least one OOP language such as Java, Go, Python, or C++
• Fluency in open-source messaging and event streaming products like Kafka, Pulsar, ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ, with understanding of concepts like Topic Scaling, Partitions, Consumer Groups
• Experience building Kafka Connectors or related tooling
• Ability to design, experiment, and influence engineering and product roadmaps
• Experience partnering with engineering teams to deploy research into production
• Familiarity with CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and related tools
• Solid knowledge of CS data structures and algorithms
• Experience with analytical problem-solving using quantitative methods
• Knowledge of developer tools across the software development lifecycle
• Experience with enterprise-scale open-source messaging platforms
• Experience with CI/CD tools like GIT, Jenkins, CircleCI, SonarQube; knowledge of Terraform, Ansible is a plus
• Knowledge of monitoring tools like Grafana and Prometheus is a plus
• Familiarity with Azure Service Bus and Azure Event Hub is a plus

Experience:

• 6+ years of professional experience
• 4+ years in open-source frameworks
• 3+ years in architecture and design
• 3+ years with cloud services like AWS, GCP, or Azure (preferred)

Education:

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