Distinguished Engineer, Underwriting

Distinguished Engineer, Underwriting

Company: GEICO

Base pay range: $150,000 – $300,000 per year

Position Summary
GEICO is seeking an experienced Engineer to build high‑performance, low‑maintenance, zero‑downtime platforms and applications. This role supports the transition from a traditional IT model to a technology‑driven organization, driving engineering excellence and fostering a culture of psychological safety and continuous improvement.

Position Description
The Distinguished Engineer works with Staff and Senior Engineers to innovate, build new systems, enhance existing ones, and identify opportunities to apply deep technical expertise. The role leads the strategy and execution of a technical roadmap, increases delivery velocity, and unlocks new engineering capabilities.

Position Responsibilities

• Focus on multiple areas in Underwriting and provide technical leadership to the organization
• Collaborate with product managers, business operations, and other engineering teams to solve complex problems
• Develop and execute technical software development strategy for diverse domains, evolving the tech stack with modern backend and frontend frameworks, storage, event, and messaging solutions
• Lead AI adoption in various underwriting task handling, development, and testing activities
• Design, develop, test, and launch major projects while leading other engineers to contribute
• Ensure quality, usability, and performance of solutions
• Mentor and coach the technical expertise of engineering and product community members
• Influence and educate leadership at all levels
• Share best practices and improve processes within and across teams
• Analyze cost and forecast, integrating them into business plans
• Determine and support resource requirements, evaluate operational processes, measure outcomes, and sponsor continuous learning

Qualifications

• Fluency and specialization with at least two modern languages such as Java, Kotlin, Golang or C#, including object‑oriented design
• Experience designing new and improving existing systems with architecture excellence, design patterns, reliability, and scalability in mind
• Experience building micro‑services‑oriented architecture with gRPC interfaces and event‑driven systems with Kafka
• Proficiency in programming languages like Java, C#, or other object‑oriented languages, SQL, and No
  
  SQL databases, containers such as Kubernetes, and a variety of cloud tools and services
• Experience with continuous integration, delivery, and infrastructure as code
• Fluency in Dev Ops concepts, cloud architecture, and operational portals on major cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, and GCP
• Experience leveraging scripting languages for task automation
• Experience with application monitoring tools and performance tuning
• Experience in security protocols and products: understanding of directory service, SAML, OAuth
• In‑depth knowledge of data structures and algorithms
• Experience solving analytical problems with quantitative approaches
• Ability to thrive in a fast‑paced, startup‑like environment
• Exemplary experimental design, influence on engineering direction, and product roadmap contributions
• Experience partnering with engineering teams and transferring research to production

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in the Insurance or Underwriting domains
• Proven ability to integrate AI/ML technologies into applications to enhance efficiency and scalability

Experience

• 12+ years of professional software development experience within a Java framework (J2EE, web containers) or similar modern languages such as Kotlin, Golang, or C#
• 10+ years of experience with architecture and design
• 6+ years of experience with AWS, GCP, Azure, or another cloud service
• 6+ years of experience in open‑source frameworks
• Experience with risk engineering, compliance, operations, or Insur Tech is a plus

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or equivalent education or work experience

Benefits

• Comprehensive total rewards program with personalized coverage for employees and families
• Financial benefits:
  
  market‑competitive compensation, 401(k) plan with 6% match, performance incentives, tuition assistance
• Additional benefits such as mental health care,…