Staff Engineer - CMaaS (Platform and Tools - VMs)

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.

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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.)

- 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.

- 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.