Distinguished Engineer – Private Cloud Platform Engineering
Palo Alto, CA - USA
Job Summary
Why Join GEICO
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 on relentless innovation to exceed our customers expectations while making a real impact on local communities nationwide.
Founded in 1936 GEICO is a member of the Berkshire Hathaway family of companies and one of the largest auto insurers in the United States. When you join our company we want you to feel valued supported and proud to work here. Thats why we offer the GEICO Pledge: Great Company Great Culture Great Rewards and Great Careers.
Distinguished Engineer Private Cloud Platform Engineering
Position Summary
GEICO is seeking a transformational Distinguished Engineer to lead the technical vision architecture and evolution of our next-generation private cloud platform. This role willbe responsible fordriving the strategy design and implementation of a highly scalable secure and operationally efficient cloud ecosystem built on OpenStack Kubernetes Ceph and Software Defined Networking technologies.
As one of GEICOs most senior technical leaders you will define the future-state architecture for our multi-region private cloud influence technology decisions across Infrastructure Security Platform Engineering and Developer Experience organizations and help accelerate GEICOs modernization journey. You will partner with engineering leaders architects and executives to build cloud capabilities that rival public cloud providers whileleveragingopen-source technologies and commodity hardware tooptimizecost resilience and scalability.
This role requires deepexpertisein cloud infrastructure distributed systems networking storage architecture and platform engineering along with the ability toinfluence acrossorganizational boundaries and mentor senior engineering talent.
What You Will Do
Technical Strategy & Architecture
Define and own the long-term technical roadmap for GEICOs Private Cloud Platform.
Establish architectural standards for OpenStack Kubernetes Ceph SDN identity integration observability and automation platforms.
Lead design reviews across multiple organizations and drive architectural consistency throughout the infrastructure ecosystem.
Evaluate emerging technologies and recommend strategic investments that improve platform capabilities operational excellence and cost efficiency.
Private Cloud Platform Leadership
Architect and evolve a large-scale OpenStack-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform.
Define multi-region designs supporting virtual machines bare metal services storage networking and container platforms.
Drive modernization initiatives including platform resiliency disaster recovery multi-datacenter expansion and workload migration from legacy virtualization platforms.
Partner with security teams to implement Zero Trust networking workload identity encryption and compliance controls.
Software Defined Networking
Definesoftware-defined networking architectures spanning datacenter and hybrid cloud environments.
Drive innovations in network virtualization overlay technologies routing automation load balancingfirewallintegration and network observability.
Partner closely with networking teams to design scalable east-west and north-south traffic architectures.
Software Defined Storage
Provide technical leadership for large-scale Ceph deployments supporting block object and cloud-native storage services.
Designhighly availablestorage architectures for OpenStack Kubernetes and application platforms.
Drive capacity planning performance optimization data durability disaster recovery and operational excellence initiatives.
Engineering Leadership
MentorSenior Staff Principal and Staff Engineers.
Lead critical incident reviews architecture reviews and technical decision-making forums.
Build alignment across infrastructure security platform and application engineering organizations.
Serve as a trusted advisor to executive leadership for private cloud strategy and investment decisions.
Required Qualifications
Experience
15 years of software infrastructure cloud or platform engineering experience.
5yearsoperatingat Principal Senior Staff Distinguished Engineer or equivalent technical leadership level.
Proventrack recorddesigning andoperatinglarge-scale cloud platforms supporting thousands of workloads.
Technical Expertise
Kubernetes
Deepexpertisein Kubernetes architecture operations networking storage security and ecosystem tooling.
Experience with platform engineering and internal developer platforms.
OpenStack
Extensive experience with OpenStack services including:
Nova
Neutron
Cinder
Glance
Keystone
Ironic
Placement
Experience designing andoperating productionOpenStack environments at scale.
Ceph
Expert knowledge of Ceph architecture and operations.
Experience with:
RBD
RGW
OSD tuning
Performance optimization
Multi-site deployments
Capacity and durability planning
Software Defined Networking
Deep understanding of SDN principles and architectures.
Experience with technologies such as:
EVPN/VXLAN
BGP
Overlay networking
SmartNICtechnologies
Network virtualization
Cloud networking
Service mesh architectures
Automation & Software Engineering
Strong coding skills in one or more of:
Go
Python
Rust
Java
Expertisewith Infrastructure-as-Code and automation frameworks.
Experience buildinghighly reliabledistributed systems.
Preferred Qualifications
Experience building private cloud environments that compete with hyperscale cloud capabilities.
Experience migrating workloads from VMware or other legacy virtualization platforms.
Familiarity with AI/ML infrastructure platforms GPU orchestration and high-performance computing environments.
Experience operating infrastructure atmulti-petabyte scale.
Experience with platform observability and SRE practices.
Strong understanding of cybersecurity compliance and zero-trust architecture.
What Success Looks Like
Within the first 12 months this leader will:
Improve developer experience through self-service infrastructure and platform capabilities.
Accelerate migration from legacy virtualization platforms to modern open-source alternatives.
Increase platform reliability scalability and operational efficiency across GEICO datacenters.
Establish engineering standards and architectural patterns adopted across multiple infrastructure organizations.
Influence technology direction well beyond their immediate team through technical leadership mentorship and innovation.
Why This Role Matters
This Distinguished Engineer will play a critical role in shaping GEICOs future infrastructure platformbuilding a secure scalable software-defined private cloud capable of supporting the companys next decade of growth while improving agility resiliency and cost efficiency.
#LI-RP2
Annual Salary
$140000.00 - $300000.00The 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 candidates work experience education and training the work location as well as market and business considerations.
The GEICO Pledge:
Great Company:Protecting customers through lifes twists and turns with innovation and integrity.
Great Careers:Personalized development programs mentorship and certification assistance.
Great Culture:Inclusive and collaborative culture rooted in shared success.
Great Rewards:Competitive pay benefits and flexibility to support your well-being and future.
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.
Required Experience:
IC