Staff Engineer - CMaaS (Platform and Tools - VMs)

Position Summary

GEICO is seeking an experienced Staff Engineer with a passion for 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 with engineering excellence as its mission, while co-creating the culture of psychological safety and continuous improvement.

Position Description

Our Staff Engineers work with our Distinguished Engineers, Sr. Staff Engineers, and Sr. Engineers to innovate and build new systems, improve, and enhance existing systems as well as identify new opportunities to apply your knowledge to solve critical problems. You will lead the strategy and execution of a technical roadmap that will increase the velocity of delivering products and unlock new engineering capabilities.

The Platform and Tools - VMs team is dedicated to realizing a secure, reliable, scalable, and highly efficient next-generation virtual machine management and orchestration platform running on Kubernetes.

We are seeking an experienced engineer specializing in Configuration Management to lead the design, implementation, and evolution of our configuration management infrastructure. This role requires deep technical expertise in configuration management systems, infrastructure as code, and the ability to drive technical strategy across engineering teams. The ideal candidate will be a leader who can architect scalable, reliable, and maintainable configuration management solutions.

Position Responsibilities

Technical Leadership

• Design and architect enterprise-grade configuration management systems and platforms.
• Lead the development of configuration management tools, frameworks, and best practices.
• Drive technical decisions and establish standards for configuration management across the organization.
• Mentor and guide engineers on configuration management principles and practices.
• Develop automation for configuration deployment, validation, and rollback.
• Create self-service tooling for configuration management.

System Design & Implementation

• Design scalable configuration management solutions that support thousands of services and environments.
• Implement infrastructure as code (IaC) patterns and tooling (Terraform, Ansible, Puppet, Chef, etc.).
• Build and maintain configuration management platforms and services.
• Develop automation for configuration deployment, validation, and rollback.
• Create self-service tooling for configuration management.

Strategy & Innovation

• Define the technical roadmap for configuration management capabilities.
• Evaluate and recommend new tools, technologies, and methodologies.
• Drive adoption of configuration management best practices across engineering teams.
• Identify opportunities to improve configuration management processes and reduce operational overhead.
• Stay current with industry trends and emerging technologies in configuration management.

Collaboration & Communication

• Work closely with platform, infrastructure, and application engineering teams.
• Collaborate with product managers and stakeholders to understand requirements.
• Communicate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Document architecture decisions, patterns, and best practices.
• Present technical proposals and solutions to leadership.

Operational Excellence

• Ensure configuration management systems meet usability, reliability, security, and performance requirements.
• Implement monitoring, alerting, and observability for configuration management infrastructure.
• Troubleshoot and resolve complex configuration management issues.
• Establish disaster recovery and backup strategies for configuration data.
• Maintain compliance with security and regulatory requirements.
• Fulfill on-call responsibilities and offer operational support.

Qualifications

• Deep knowledge of configuration management tools (Ansible, Puppet, Chef, SaltStack, or similar), including authoring reusable modules/roles and establishing internal standards.
• Extensive practical knowledge and experience in Linux and Windows operating systems, internals, and command-line utilities.
• Experience with Operating System hardening practices and frameworks (CIS Benchmarks, NIST SP 800-53, DISA STIGs, PCI DSS).
• Professional experience in software development using modern programming languages like Python (preferred) or Go, Typescript, Java.
• Experience with version control systems (Git) and CI/CD pipelines.
• Understanding of cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Strong experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Crossplane, Azure Resource Manager, CloudFormation, Pulumi, etc.).

Experience

• 6+ years of PaaS and IaaS software development experience.
• 6+ years of Linux and Windows system administration experience.
• 4+ years specializing in system design and implementation.
• 4+ years of hands-on experience with Azure, OpenStack, AWS, GCP, or other cloud services.
• 2+ years working with open-source frameworks.

Education

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

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.

Benefits

• Comprehensive Total Rewards program that offers personalized coverage tailor-made for you and your family’s overall well-being.
• Financial benefits including market-competitive compensation; a 401K savings plan vested from day one that offers a 6% match; performance and recognition-based incentives; and tuition assistance.
• Access to additional benefits like mental healthcare as well as fertility and adoption assistance.
• Supports flexibility - We provide workplace flexibility as well as our GEICO Flex program, which offers the ability to work from anywhere in the US for up to four weeks per year.

Equal Employment Opportunity Statement

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.