Staff Engineer, Hybrid Cloud Fabric at GEICO in Palo Alto, CA

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.

Staff Engineer – Multi-Cloud Service Mesh

Position Summary:

Become a key player in GEICO's tech transformation! We are seeking a Senior or Staff Engineer with deep expertise in service mesh technologies to help implement modern, scalable, and secure communication fabric across our hybrid cloud environment. You will play a vital role in enabling seamless and secure communication between services, enhancing observability, and ensuring high availability and performance for our applications.

This job might be for you if:

• You are passionate about service mesh technologies and their role in building resilient and scalable microservices architectures.
• You enjoy exploring cutting-edge technologies and pushing the boundaries of what's possible.
• You are eager to contribute to the Istio community and share your expertise with others.
• You thrive in a collaborative environment and enjoy working with diverse teams to solve complex problems.
• You are excited by the opportunity to shape the future of GEICO's application infrastructure and contribute to our transformation into a cloud-native organization.

Responsibilities:

• Design and implement a robust service mesh architecture, encompassing traffic management, security, observability, and resilience for microservices across public and private clouds within our on-premises data centers.
• Integrate the service mesh with existing infrastructure and applications, ensuring seamless operation and interoperability with various platforms and technologies, including legacy systems.
• Establish and enforce service mesh best practices, including security policies, traffic routing rules, circuit breakers, and access control mechanisms, to maintain a secure and reliable application environment.
• Develop comprehensive monitoring and observability dashboards to provide deep insights into service mesh health, performance, and potential issues, enabling proactive problem identification and resolution.
• Guide and mentor engineers on service mesh principles and best practices, fostering knowledge sharing and expertise development within the team, empowering them to contribute effectively to the service mesh implementation.
• Work closely with networking and security teams to ensure secure and efficient integration of the service mesh with on-premises infrastructure and networks, addressing potential challenges and ensuring smooth operation.
• Partner with SREs to establish service mesh observability, monitoring, and alerting strategies for maintaining high availability and performance, collaborating to define SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets.
• Actively engage with the Istio community, contribute to open-source projects, and represent GEICO's leadership in service mesh adoption.

Technical Skills:

• Service mesh expertise (dev): You are familiar with mesh architecture, components, and configuration options, including advanced traffic management, security policies, and telemetry customization.
• Service mesh experience (ops): You have designed, implemented, and managed service mesh solutions at scale, addressing challenges related to performance, security, and observability.
• Programming skills: Experience with Go is a must; Rust is a bonus.
• Linux OS: In-depth knowledge of Linux operating systems, including performance tuning, troubleshooting, and security best practices.
• Networking: Advanced understanding of networking concepts and tools (e.g., iptables, netfilter, traffic shaping) for analyzing and optimizing service mesh performance within the hybrid cloud environment.
• Kubernetes and containerization: Extensive experience with Kubernetes and container orchestration platforms, including networking, security, and service management.
• Microservices architecture: Deep understanding of microservices design patterns, service discovery mechanisms, API gateways, and distributed tracing.
• Observability and monitoring: Expertise in tools like Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger, and Kiali to monitor service mesh performance and troubleshoot issues.
• Security best practices: Knowledge of zero-trust security principles, authentication and authorization mechanisms, and encryption technologies within the context of service mesh.
• Networking and security integration: Knowledge of network protocols, security policies, and best practices for integrating the service mesh with on-premises infrastructure.
• SRE practices for service mesh: Understanding of SRE principles and experience applying them to service mesh environments for reliability and performance optimization.

Experience:

• 6+ years of professional experience in software engineering, DevOps, or related fields.
• 4+ years of experience designing, implementing, and managing microservices architectures.
• 2+ years of hands-on experience with Istio and service mesh technologies.
• Experience with Kubernetes and container orchestration platforms.
• Proven ability to lead technical projects and mentor other engineers.

#LI-RP2

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.

GEICO will consider sponsoring a new qualified 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.