Sr. Director Engineering, Head of Developer Experience

Position Overview:

GEICO is seeking an experienced and visionary Head of Developer Experience. In this role you will be responsible for defining, developing, and driving SW engineering practices and solutions impacting over three thousand engineers at GEICO. The scope of this role includes responsibilities for design and delivery of internal Development Portal, Integrated Development Environments run either locally or remotely, Knowledge Base and Paved Paths for common solutions, Generative AI solutions for SW developers, as well as Source Control including Monorepos and Polyrepos. You will own the software development lifecycle starting from the ideation and planning phase of the services up to a code commit to initiate the qualification and delivery process.

This role requires a deep understanding of software development processes enabling engineers at various levels of expertise from new college hires to Distinguished Engineers to maximize software quality and speed of delivery as well as increase developer productivity and satisfaction.

This role offers a unique opportunity to lead and shape the organization's software development lifecycle strategy while closely aligning with SRE practices to ensure the stability and reliability of critical systems and services.

Key Responsibilities:

Technical Leadership:

• Provide strategic direction and technical leadership to develop and implement tool driven software development experience that eliminated developer friction and maximizes developer satisfaction.

• Lead team of SW, SDET and SRE professionals responsible for developing internal developer portal, service catalogue, integrated development environments and other tooling for developing services ranging from mobile applications to large scale infrastructure and platform software. Sensitivity: General/Internal

Team Management:

• Build and nurture a high-performing software engineering team, providing mentorship, coaching, and guidance to foster a culture of continuous learning and improvement.

• Spearhead a team of software engineering professionals responsible for standardizing our software development strategies to identify gaps and propose improvements.

Collaboration and Communication:

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including engineering, operations, and IT, to design and architect software development tools and frameworks that meet the organization's evolving needs.

• Present a reliability vision and strategic recommendations with clarity and concision to stakeholders having varying degrees of SW engineering processes fluency.

• Develop and own relationships with technology and business partners.

• Improve your team's performance reporting, focus on impact, and bring transparency to critical workflows.

• Expand the team by lobbying for additional resources and recruiting new open positions.

• Manage department budgets, resource allocation, and vendor relationships to optimize costs and maintain high-quality outcomes.

Qualifications:

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, relevant technical field, or equivalent practical experience. Advanced degree preferred.

• Extensive experience with development portal and software catalogues (e.g. open-source Backstage or similar commercial solutions).

• Extensive experience with implementing, enhancing and developing either core functionality or extensions for open-source integrated development environments such as Visual Studio Code.

• Experience implementing and supporting monorepos and polyrepos and related technologies such as Bazel.

• Experience with implementing and supporting generative AI supporting software development use cases such as GitHub Copilot.

• Extensive experience with release management and deployment techniques such as canary deployments, blue / green releases, and feature flagging.

• Knowledge of public and on-premise cloud infrastructure (e.g., AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, OpenStack, Kubernetes) and experience with designing, deploying, and managing fault-tolerant systems in such environments.

• Excellent leadership and team management skills with a passion for mentoring and fostering professional growth.

• Strong problem-solving and analytical abilities, with a keen eye for detail and a passion for driving operational efficiency.

• Experience in budget management, resource allocation, and vendor collaboration

 

Annual Salary

$195,000.00 - $315,000.00

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 sel