Senior Staff Engineer

Become a key player in GEICO's tech transformation! We are seeking a Distinguished Engineer with deep expertise in service mesh technologies to architect and implement a modern, scalable, and secure communication fabric across our hybrid multi-cloud environment. You will play a critical 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): In-depth understanding of mesh architecture, components, and configuration options, including advanced traffic management, security policies, and telemetry customization. 

• Service mesh experience (ops): Proven track record of designing, implementing, and managing service mesh solutions at scale, addressing challenges related to performance, security, and observability. 

• Programming skills: Experience with Go or Python for extending and customizing the service mesh and developing related tools. 

• Linux OS: In-depth knowledge of Linux operating systems, including performance tuning, troubleshooting, and security best practices. 

• Networking: Advanced u