Senior Manager, Site Reliability Engineering – Datacenter Hardware and IaaS

Senior Manager, Site Reliability Engineering – Datacenter Hardware and IaaS 

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Position Summary  

GEICO is seeking an experienced Senior Manager with a passion for building high performance, low-latency platforms, and applications. You will build and manage a team of engineers with a deep focus on delivering enterprise-wide product to operate in a highly performant and efficient way. You will help drive our insurance business transformation as we redefine experiences for our customers. 

Position Description  

​Our Senior Manager is an engineering leader who works with the engineering staff to innovate and build new engineering solutions, improve and enhance existing solutions as well as leverage engineering solutions to solve critical operational problems. A Senior Manager will lead strategy and execution of a technical roadmap that will increase the velocity of delivering products and unlock new engineering capabilities. The ideal candidate has deep technical expertise to improve application performance, capacity benchmarking, improve availability and reliability, design and evolve cloud infrastructure and architecture. 

Position Responsibilities  

​​As a Senior Manager, you will:  

• Have strong technical expertise and leadership, you are able to lead from the trenches and have proven knowledge in your field 

• Be able to drive infrastructure as code and show proficiency in field-appropriate programming languages, lead by example 

• ​Work with your Director to address project dependencies, negotiate and estimate incremental delivery dates for milestones with the stakeholder community, and deliver projects on time  

• ​Identify and raise appropriate project risks, in addition to presenting detailed and implementable solutions or alternatives  

• ​Understand how requirements and design choices may impact systems across multiple areas  

• ​Report on your team’s progress for project and other key metrics, in addition to presenting detailed and implementable ideas for areas to further improve or influence product or project delivery  

• ​Initiate and support performance evaluation of team members  

• ​Cultivate a culture that motivates all levels of performers to higher levels of achievement   

• ​Build and maintain relationships with your team members to support an environment of trust  

• ​Influence those you motivate and coach to be receptive to feedback by cultivating a culture that acknowledges and expects individuals to grow and be accountable as a result of the experience gained (growth mindset)  

• ​Identify where technical or analytical skill gaps put future team deliverables at risk and craft a plan to remediate, consistently challenge team members to share knowledge and learn new technologies  

• ​Proficiently execute difficult conversations on development and performance  

• ​Craft and deliver strategic and well-structured persuasive arguments to drive projects that drive process improvement, enhance cost leadership, and/or customer experience 

• ​Manage up to leadership as well as give feedback when appropriate  

• ​Administer coaching plan(s) and Performance Improvement Plan(s)  

• ​Craft fully compliant quality documentation  

• ​Compliant negotiation and execution of warning administration and/or involuntary termination  

• ​Develop the team budget and be accountable for reporting on results achieved at regular intervals  

• ​Significantly contribute to the team planning process to include surfacing associate level proposals​  

• Collaborate with the product teams to understand their pain points around performance, resiliency and formulate strategies to address recurring issues in a sustainable way 

• Influence and build vision with product owners to ship quality products in a faster pace 

• Develop and motivate teams to solve complex problems and be a strong advocate for open-source technologies and solutions 

• Be responsible for building and mentoring a new team of Site reliability engineers and managers 

• Drive the team towards building solutions towards the long-term goals while ensuring that high priority tech debts are solved in an efficient way 

• Be a strong thought leader in Site Reliability engineering, Operational excellence, and DevOps Principles 

• Consistently share best practices and improve processes within and across teams 

Qualifications  

• Strong knowledge in modern at-scale datacenter architectures. 

• Experience with OCP hardware and related technologies ( eg. OpenBMC, Redfish ), bonus for knowledge in low level driver development.  

• Focus on leveraging infrastructure as code as a primary means of control. Building CI/CD chains for datacenter operations 

• Experience in building IaaS systems based on OpenStack 

• Knowledge of cloud computing technologies and concepts (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, etc) 

• Working knowledge of object-oriented development, Gang of Four (GOF) Design Patterns, Microservices, Dependency Injection with IOC containers, and both frontend and backend unit testing 

• Proven ability to concentrate and demonstrate a capacity for learning technical concepts and adapting to new technologies quickly 

• Strong Cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure etc.) platform knowledge 

• Proficiency in Project Management and work item management tools such as Azure DevOps and Portfolio 

• Strong foundation in algorithms, data structures, and core computer science concepts 

• Experience in existing Operational Portals such as Azure Portal 

• Fluency with Python, Golang, JSON, and RESTful Web Services 

• Experience with application monitoring tools and performance assessments 

• Experience in PowerShell Scripting 

• Constructing, interpreting, and applying metrics to your work and decision making, able to use those metrics to identify correlation between drivers and results, and using that information to drive prioritization and action  

• Strong understanding of Site Reliability Engineering and DevOps principles 

• Strong technical acumen in Cloud Architecture, Performance Benchmarking, and Capacity planning 

• Expert in Container orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes), container runtimes and optimization 

• Experience with driving cultural change in technical excellence, quality, and efficiency 

• Experience managing and growing technical leaders and teams 

• In-depth knowledge of CS data structures and algorithms 

 Experience  

• ​​8+ years of experience in leadership position 

• 8+ years of leading a SRE team 

• 6+ years coding experience 

• 5+ years of development in a large-scale, mission-critical environment 

• 5+ years of hands-on work experience supervising personnel in a technical environment 

• 5+ years of experience with one of the public cloud - AWS, GCP, Azure, or another cloud service 

• 2+ years' experience with automated testing including Unit, Integration, and End-to-End functional testing 

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Education  

• ​​Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology or related field, or equivalent experience