Distinguished Engineer – Private Cloud Platform Engineering

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 will be responsible for driving 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 GEICO's 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 GEICO's modernization journey. You will partner with engineering leaders, architects, and executives to build cloud capabilities that rival public cloud providers while leveraging open-source technologies and commodity hardware to optimize cost, resilience, and scalability. 

This role requires deep expertise in cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, networking, storage architecture, and platform engineering along with the ability to influence across organizational boundaries and mentor senior engineering talent. 

What You Will Do 

Technical Strategy & Architecture 

• Define and own the long-term technical roadmap for GEICO's 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 

• Define software-defined networking architectures spanning datacenter and hybrid cloud environments. 

• Drive innovations in network virtualization, overlay technologies, routing automation, load balancing, firewall integration, 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. 

• Design highly available storage architectures for OpenStack, Kubernetes, and application platforms. 

• Drive capacity planning, performance optimization, data durability, disaster recovery, and operational excellence initiatives. 

Engineering Leadership 

• Mentor Senior 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. 

• 5+ years operating at Principal, Senior Staff, Distinguished Engineer, or equivalent technical leadership level. 

• Proven track record designing and operating large-scale cloud platforms supporting thousands of workloads. 

Technical Expertise 

Kubernetes 

• Deep expertise in 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 and operating production OpenStack 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 

• SmartNIC technologies 

• Network virtualization 

• Cloud networking 

• Service mesh architectures 

Automation & Software Engineering 

• Strong coding skills in one or more of:  

• Go 

• Python 

• Rust 

• Java 

• Expertise with Infrastructure-as-Code and automation frameworks. 

• Experience building highly reliable distributed 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 at multi-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 GEICO's future infrastructure platform—building a secure, scalable, software-defined private cloud capable of supporting the company's next decade of growth while improving agility, resiliency, and cost efficiency. 

 

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