Distinguished Engineer - Networking

GEICO is seeking an experienced Distinguished Engineer with a passion for building high-performance, low maintenance, zero-downtime platforms, and applications. The role involves driving the company's insurance business transformation by innovating and enhancing systems, while ensuring resilience and reliability in networking and datacenters.

Responsibilities:

• Provide thought leadership in datacenter reliability for networks and servers, staying ahead of industry trends and emerging technologies
• Conduct comprehensive risk assessments to identify potential threats and vulnerabilities
• Design and implement robust strategies to ensure maintainability and observability of our hardware and operating system assets
• Lead the design and architecture of resilient and scalable systems, considering both on-premises and cloud-based solutions
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to integrate GEICO best practices into the development and deployment processes
• Develop and maintain comprehensive incident response plans to address various disaster scenarios on our networking and datacenters
• Conduct regular simulations and drills to ensure the readiness of the organization in the event of a disaster
• Hands-on software engineering and SDLC best practices (Technical Review Documents, Architecture, Software Development, Software Reviews, Testing, Production Readiness Reviews, among others)
• Evaluate, select, and implement cutting-edge technologies and tools to enhance our datacenter capabilities including but not limited to processes, compliance, and visibility
• Stay current with industry best practices and emerging technologies to continuously improve our network and datacenter capabilities
• Work closely with executive leadership, IT teams, and other stakeholders to communicate the importance of networks and datacenters and foster a culture of resilience
• Act as a trusted advisor, providing guidance on network, hardware and datacenter best practices to technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Be a role model and mentor, helping to coach and strengthen the technical expertise and know-how of our engineering and product community
• Analyze cost and forecast, incorporating them into business plans
• Determine and support resource requirements, evaluate operational processes, measure outcomes to ensure desired results, and demonstrate adaptability and sponsoring continuous learning

Requirements:

• Fluency and specialization in software development and best practices using programming languages such as Golang and Python
• Understanding of datacenter and LAN/WAN network designs with a focus on underlay networks and physical infrastructure
• Understanding of operating systems and how they interface with hardware
• Understanding of datacenter facilities, lifecycle and urbanization
• Understanding of SQL and NoSQL databases, including stateful services management and storage
• Understanding of networking, caches, key/value stores, load balancing, global load balancing, queues, DNS and CDN
• Primary Focus on managing infrastructure through code
• Deep knowledge of SRE practices, methodologies, and principles, along with a solid understanding of on-prem and public cloud-based network, compute, and storage technologies
• In-depth knowledge of hybrid cloud architecture, IaaS and PaaS technologies, container orchestration platforms (e.g., Kubernetes), cloud efficiency and observability etc
• Strong background in incident management
• Ability to create incident response playbooks, runbooks, incident triaging strategies, and post-incident analysis to drive continuous improvement in system reliability and availability
• Experience with open-source management and monitoring tools
• Experience with infrastructure automation, tooling, and configuration management frameworks (e.g., Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Pulumi, Terraform, etc.)
• Familiarity with cloud security best practices and compliance standards
• Excellent leadership skills with a passion for mentoring and fostering professional growth
• Detail-oriented and a drive for operational excellence
• Visionary thinker with the ability to anticipate future challenges and opportunities
• Excellent communication skills
• Strong analytical and problem-solving capabilities
• 12+ years of professional software development experience
• 10+ years of experience with architecture and design
• 6+ years of experience with AWS, GCP, Azure, or another cloud service
• 6+ years of experience in open-source frameworks
• Bachelor's degree in computer science, Information Systems, or equivalent education or work experience