Senior Platform Engineer, Build & Run

Medallia; McLean (VA); Hybrid; USD 135,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health and wellness benefits

401(k)

Paid parental leave

Paid holidays

Job summary

Medallia is seeking an experienced SRE/Platform Engineer in the McLean/Tysons area to build production-grade automation using AI-assisted tools. You will own provisioning, deployment, scaling, and incident response across Kubernetes, cloud, and on-prem environments.

You will work in a fast-paced, cross-functional team, handling on-call escalations and ensuring reliability while shipping clean, scalable solutions. This hybrid role prioritizes local candidates in the Tysons vicinity.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in SRE, software development, or platform engineering with hands-on coding.
• Able to build, review, and ship production code independently.
• Experience with AI-assisted coding and agentic tools.
• Kubernetes deployments, Helm, GitOps, canary/blue-green releases.
• Cloud experience in AWS or OCI.
• Understand databases, queues, load balancing, caching, APIs.
• Own both build and run of the platform; on-call readiness.
• Incident and change management in production environments.
• Proficient in Python and Go; multitask across incidents and projects.

Responsibilities

• Build automation and tooling to reduce manual ops work.
• Use AI coding assistants and agentic workflows daily.
• Own platform lifecycle: provisioning, deployment, scaling, decommissioning.
• Troubleshoot full-stack production issues from DB to API to infra.
• Drive database and infrastructure hygiene without production impact.
• Participate in on-call rotations and manage escalations end-to-end.
• Move fast with meticulous execution under time pressure.

Skills

SRE experience

Hands-on coding

AI-assisted coding

Python

Go

Incident management

multitask

Tools

Kubernetes

Terraform

Ansible

CloudFormation

Jenkins

ArgoCD

Job description

Overview

Medallia is the pioneer and market leader in Experience Management. Our award-winning SaaS platform, Medallia Experience Cloud, leads the market in the management of experiences, insights, and actions for candidates, customers, employees, patients, and residents alike.

We believe that every experience is a memory that can last a lifetime. Experiences shape the way people feel about a company. And they greatly influence how likely people are to advocate, contribute, and stay. At Medallia, we are committed to creating a world where organizations are loved by their customers and their employees.

We empower exceptional people to create extraordinary experiences together.

Bring your whole self.

The Role and Team

This is not a traditional SRE seat. We need someone who codes like an engineer and operates like an SRE. Someone who ships production-grade automation using AI-assisted and agentic coding tools, and who also owns the platform that automation runs on: provisioning, deployment, uptime, and incident response.

High visibility. Cross-functional. Fast-paced. You will context-switch across incidents, platform builds, and strategic initiatives in the same day, and still ship clean, methodical work under deadline pressure.

Responsibilities

• Build automation and tooling that eliminates manual ops work, not scripts that patch over problems.
• Use AI coding assistants and agentic workflows as a core part of your daily engineering, not a novelty.
• Own platform lifecycle: provisioning, deployment (canary, blue/green, rollout), scaling, and decommissioning across Kubernetes, cloud, and on-prem.
• Troubleshoot full-stack production issues, from database to API to infra.
• Drive database and infrastructure hygiene: cloning, migration, decommissioning, orphan cleanup, without breaking production.
• Sit in the on-call rotation and own escalations end to end.
• Move fast without cutting corners. Meticulous execution under time pressure is the job, not the exception.

Candidates based in the Tysons vicinity will be prioritized as this role is Hybrid, 3 days per week onsite.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years in SRE, software development, or platform engineering, with real hands-on coding, not just scripting glue
• Demonstrated development experience: can build, review, and ship production code independently
• Either operating with fluency or attitude to learn and blend with AI-assisted coding and agentic tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, or equivalent) as part of how you build, not a side experiment
• Demonstrated Kubernetes experience: deployments, Helm, GitOps, canary/blue-green releases
• Cloud platform experience in at least one AWS or OCI
• Demonstrated understanding of system architecture: databases, message queues, load balancing, auto-scaling, caching, API layers
• Comfortable owning both the "build it" and "run it" sides of the platform
• Incident and change management experience in customer-facing production environments
• Demonstrated scripting/dev language experience: Python and Go
• Proven ability to multitask across incidents, builds, and strategic work without dropping any of them

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with IaC (Terraform, Ansible, CloudFormation)
• Relational and NoSQL DB ops (PostgreSQL, Cassandra, MongoDB), including migration/cloning workflows
• CI/CD ownership (Jenkins, ArgoCD)
• Track record leading cross-team technical initiatives
• Security fundamentals: secrets management, SSL/cert lifecycle

Medallia is committed to equal pay and transparency. The annual base salary range for this position is $135,000 - $180,000. Please note that the salary range information provided is a general guideline and combines all of the distinct labor markets within the US. It is uncommon for an individual to be hired at or near the top of the range for their role and compensation decisions are dependent on a variety of factors. Medallia considers factors such as (but not limited to) scope and responsibilities of the position, candidate’s work experience, candidate’s work location, education/training, key skills, internal peer equity, external market data, as well as, market and business considerations when making compensation decisions.

Medallia also offers competitive health and wellness benefits, including but not limited to medical, dental, vision, 401(k), short-term and long-term disability, life and AD&D insurance, statutory leaves, paid parental leave, and paid holidays. Benefits and eligibility may vary by location and role.

At Medallia, we celebrate diversity and recognize the value it brings to our customers and employees. Medallia is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age (40 and over), disability, genetic information, veteran status or military service, or any other status protected by state or local law. Individuals with a disability who need an accommodation to apply please contact us at [e-mail]. For information regarding how Medallia collects and uses personal information, please review our Privacy Policies.

Applications will be accepted for 30 days from the date this role was posted or until the role has been filled.