Geico

Senior Staff Engineer

Geico$130K — $260K *
Enterprise Technology
8 - 10 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 10+ years building and operating large-scale distributed systems
  • Deep expertise in fault tolerance, resilience, and recovery design
  • Proven track record of org-level technical leadership
  • Strong ability to reason for and design around partial failures
  • Experience shaping shared platforms or frameworks for multiple teams

Responsibilities

  • Own long-term technical direction for orchestration platform
  • Define and evolve scalable orchestration patterns
  • Make architectural tradeoffs balancing reliability and cost
  • Serve as top-level escalation for complex failures
  • Establish standards for modeling failure and retries
  • Drive consistency in team-designed recovery workflows
  • Identify systemic reliability risks and lead mitigation initiatives
  • Mentor Staff and Senior engineers in fault-tolerant design

Benefits

  • Remote work flexibility
  • Professional development opportunities
  • Mentorship programs
  • Collaborative work environment
Full Job Description
Location: Remote - US
Level: Senior Staff Engineer
Team: Fault Tolerance & Disaster Recovery

The Role:

We are seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer to provide technical leadership for fault-tolerant orchestration at enterprise scale. This role operates at the intersection of architecture, reliability engineering, and organizational influence. You will be responsible not only for the technical evolution of our tool, but for shaping how GEICO designs, reasons about, and executes recovery workflows across hundreds of systems.

This is a role for engineers who:
  • Think in failure domains and impacted systems
  • Design systems that behave predictably under stress
  • Influence outcomes across organizations they do not manage
  • See reliability as a design outcome, not an operational afterthought


Scope & Impact

At the Senior Staff level, success is measured by durable impact across the org, not individual delivery. You will define patterns, guide long-term strategy, and ensure our tools scale technically and socially.

What You'll Do
Enterprise Technical Leadership
  • Own the long-term technical direction for our tools as GEICO's orchestration platform for failover, rebuild, and restore workflows.
  • Define and evolve orchestration patterns that scale across diverse application architectures and maturity levels.
  • Make architectural tradeoffs balancing reliability, operability, and adoption cost.
  • Serve as the top-level technical escalation point for complex orchestration and recovery failures.


Fault Tolerance & Resilience Strategy
  • Establish clear standards for modeling failure, retries, timeouts, and compensations.
  • Drive consistency in how teams design and execute recovery workflows.
  • Identify systemic reliability risks and lead cross-org initiatives to mitigate them.
  • Partner with SRE, infrastructure, and platform teams to align our tools with enterprise reliability goals.


Organizational Influence & Enablement
  • Influence teams that do not report to you through clear technical reasoning and trusted leadership.
  • Set expectations and contracts between our tools and provider systems to clarify ownership of failures.
  • Mentor Staff and Senior engineers in distributed systems thinking and fault-tolerant design.
  • Act as a technical ambassador for our tools with leadership and peer orgs.


Platform Stewardship
  • Help balance feature development, adoption support, and production stability with your teams capacity.
  • Ensure our tools remains reliable, observable, and operable as usage expands.


What We're Looking For
Required
  • 10+ years of experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems.
  • Deep expertise in fault tolerance, resilience, and recovery design.
  • Proven track record of org-level technical leadership beyond a single team.
  • Strong ability to reason about and design for partial failure.
  • Experience shaping shared platforms or frameworks used by many teams.


Strongly Preferred
  • Experience with durable execution, or workflow orchestration
  • Hands-on experience designing recovery, failover, or disaster-recovery workflows.
  • History of working through adoption challenges for platform teams.
  • Ability to translate low-level technical risks into clear business and reliability outcomes.


Annual Salary
$130,000.00 - $260,000.00
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.

About Geico

GEICO (Government Employees Insurance Company) is an American auto insurance company with headquarters in Chevy Chase, Maryland. It is the second largest auto insurer in the United States, after State Farm. GEICO is a wholly owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway that provides coverage for more than 24 million motor vehicles owned by more than 15 million policy holders as of 2017. GEICO writes private passenger automobile insurance in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. The insurance agency sells policies through local agents, called GEICO Field Representatives, and over the phone directly to the consumer, and through their website.
Learn more about Geico
Size
40,000 employees
Industry
Founded
1936

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