Staff Engineer - Applied AI at GEICO in Bethesda, MD

At GEICO, we offer a rewarding career where your ambitions are met with endless possibilities.

Every day we honor our iconic brand by offering quality coverage to millions of customers and being there when they need us most. We thrive through relentless innovation to exceed our customers’ expectations while making a real impact for our company through our shared purpose.

When you join our company, we want you to feel valued, supported and proud to work here. That’s why we offer The GEICO Pledge: Great Company, Great Culture, Great Rewards and Great Careers.

GEICO is seeking a Staff Engineer, Applied AI to help shape how Generative AI enhances customer and associate experiences across the enterprise. This is a senior, hands-on individual contributor role for someone with deep technical expertise, strong collaboration skills, and a proven ability to deliver scalable, resilient, production-ready AI systems.

You will partner with engineering teams, data scientists, and product leaders to design, build, and scale AI-powered capabilities that automate workflows, improve decision-making, and elevate user experience. You will also mentor engineers who want to learn AI, LLMs, and agent-based development, fostering a culture of learning, curiosity, and innovation.

What You Will Do

• Identify and evaluate opportunities for automating business processes using AI, intelligent workflows, and agent-based systems.
• Architect, build, and deploy applied AI solutions across high-value enterprise workflows including automation, document intelligence, decision support, and intelligent assistants.
• Design and implement AI agents and agentic workflows that orchestrate tools, APIs, reasoning steps, and business logic to automate complex processes at scale.
• Build systems and services that meet high standards for scalability, resilience, performance, and availability.
• Use knowledge graphs to enhance reasoning, entity relationships, context retrieval, and multi-step workflows.
• Collaborate with product, engineering, operations, and analytics partners to co-create scalable AI solutions and translate business needs into technical designs.
• Mentor engineers and scientists who want to develop AI and agentic workflow skills through coaching, pairing, reviews, and architectural guidance.
• Drive innovation by exploring new models, frameworks, and reasoning techniques and applying them creatively to real-world challenges.
• Lead through technical influence by providing guidance on architecture, experimentation, and deployment across multiple teams.
• Run rigorous experimentation and evaluation including hypothesis definition, measurement, validation, and iterative improvement in production environments.
• Establish and model engineering best practices for reliability, interpretability, safety, governance, and monitoring of production AI systems.

What We Are Looking For (Must Have)

• 8 or more years of professional software engineering or applied machine learning experience, including 2 or more years working with Generative AI or LLM-based systems in production.
• Strong hands-on experience with Python and modern AI frameworks such as LangChain, LangGraph, LangSmith, LlamaIndex, Hugging Face, and OpenAI or Anthropic APIs.
• Demonstrated experience designing, building, and operating production AI systems including agentic workflows and intelligent automation features.
• Proven experience building scalable, resilient, secure, and maintainable products and systems that run reliably in production.
• Strong understanding of agent architectures, workflow orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation, vector databases, and knowledge graph integration.
• Ability to collaborate deeply across teams and co-create solutions with engineers, product managers, and domain experts.
• Experience mentoring engineers and helping others grow in AI, LLM, and agent-based system design.
• A history of delivering measurable business outcomes from AI systems.
• Strong competency in distributed systems, service design, performance optimization, and reliability engineering.

Nice to Have

• Experience building advanced Generative AI capabilities including domain-tuned LLMs, vector reasoning techniques, or specialized retrieval architectures.
• Experience with insurance, financial services, or other regulated industries.
• Experience deploying AI components in Java ecosystems including Spring AI, LangChain4j, or Embabel.
• Background in document intelligence, fraud or anomaly modeling, or complex ontology and knowledge graph design.
• Familiarity with AI safety practices, evaluation frameworks, monitoring, and regulatory compliance.
• Ability to effectively communicate complex technical topics to senior leadership and non-technical stakeholders.

Who You Are

• A collaborative engineer who works well with cross-functional partners and supports the growth of those around you.
• A hands-on builder who ships reliable, scalable, production-grade systems rather than stopping at proof of concept.
• Someone who understands how to design systems that scale smoothly, recover gracefully, and operate reliably under load.
• An innovative thinker who explores new approaches, tools, and architectures and applies them thoughtfully.
• A natural mentor who enjoys helping others develop AI, LLM, and agentic workflow skills.
• A systems thinker who can connect LLMs, vector search, agents, and knowledge graphs into cohesive solutions.
• Driven by real-world impact, customer value, and long-term engineering excellence.

Why Join GEICO

• Build the next generation of AI-powered enterprise workflows and intelligent automation.
• Work on high-impact problems at large operational scale.
• Collaborate with a talented engineering organization focused on advancing AI capabilities.
• Set the standard for responsible and production-grade AI deployment across the enterprise.
• Mentor and inspire future AI builders across the company.

Annual Salary $115,000.00 - $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.

The GEICO Pledge:

Great Company: At GEICO, we help our customers through life’s twists and turns. Our mission is to protect people when they need it most and we’re constantly evolving to stay ahead of their needs.

We’re an iconic brand that thrives on innovation, exceeding our customers’ expectations and enabling our collective success. From day one, you’ll take on exciting challenges that help you grow and collaborate with dynamic teams who want to make a positive impact on people’s lives.

Great Careers: We offer a career where you can learn, grow, and thrive through personalized development programs, created with your career – and your potential – in mind. You’ll have access to industry leading training, certification assistance, career mentorship and coaching with supportive leaders at all levels.

Great Culture: We foster an inclusive culture of shared success, rooted in integrity, a bias for action and a winning mindset. Grounded by our core values, we have an an established culture of caring, inclusion, and belonging, that values different perspectives. Our teams are led by dynamic, multi-faceted teams led by supportive leaders, driven by performance excellence and unified under a shared purpose.

As part of our culture, we also offer employee engagement and recognition programs that reward the positive impact our work makes on the lives of our customers.

Great Rewards: We offer compensation and benefits built to enhance your physical well-being, mental and emotional health and financial future.

• 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.

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.