Senior Platform Software Engineer, Platform Services

Medallia; McLean (VA); Hybrid; USD 138,000 - 205,000; Full time

Job summary

Medallia is seeking a hands-on Senior Platform Software Engineer in a hybrid role. You will join the Platform Services team to build, operate, and improve distributed platforms powering the engineering org across multiple tech stacks.

You will own reliability, scale, security, and operational readiness while collaborating with multiple engineering teams. This role prioritizes candidates in the Tysons vicinity; onsite 3 days per week.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software, systems, platform, DevOps, SRE, or related roles.
• 3+ years operating or troubleshooting distributed systems in production.
• Experience building or operating distributed systems and high-availability architectures.
• Hands-on experience with distributed platforms such as Kafka, Redis, Elasticsearch, Spark, Airflow, or similar.
• Willingness to learn and operate across a broad technology portfolio.

Responsibilities

• Own and operate highly available distributed platforms, ensuring reliability, scalability, performance, security, and readiness.
• Lead incident response and root-cause analysis, driving systemic improvements.
• Design failover, DR, backup/restore, upgrade, and capacity strategies.
• Build automation and tooling to reduce toil and improve provisioning, deployments, upgrades, and recovery.
• Develop observability through metrics, logging, dashboards, alerts, and actionable signals.
• Review architectures and production-readiness of services consuming our platforms.
• Collaborate with engineering teams to establish reliable platform patterns.
• Create technical documentation and runbooks to improve operational maturity.
• Participate in on-call rotation for 24/7 reliability.

Skills

Distributed systems

Kafka

Go

Python

Java

Cloud infrastructure

SRE

Education

B.S. in Computer Science or Engineering

Tools

Kubernetes

Redis

Elasticsearch

Spark

Airflow

MongoDB

Trino

Hadoop

Cassandra

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

We are looking for a hands‑on Senior Platform Software Engineer who enjoys solving complex problems in high‑scale, highly available distributed systems.

As a key member of our Platform Services team, you will build, operate, and continuously improve the shared platforms that power our engineering organization. Our team manages hundreds of production and non‑production instances across a broad technology portfolio, providing reliable, scalable, and secure services to multiple engineering teams.

Our ecosystem includes Kafka, Redis, Elasticsearch, Spark, Airflow, MongoDB, ClickHouse, Trino, Flink, Hadoop, Cassandra, KVRocks, and SnapLogic.

We value strong platform and distributed‑systems fundamentals, the ability to operate complex systems in production, and the curiosity to develop expertise across multiple technologies.

Responsibilities

• Own and operate highly available distributed platforms, ensuring reliability, scalability, performance, security, and operational readiness.
• Troubleshoot complex production issues, lead incident response and root‑cause analysis, and drive systemic improvements.
• Design and validate failover, disaster recovery, backup/restore, upgrade, and capacity strategies.
• Build automation and tooling to reduce operational toil and improve provisioning, deployments, upgrades, and recovery.
• Develop observability through metrics, logging, dashboards, alerts, and actionable operational signals.
• Review architectures and production‑readiness of services consuming our platforms.
• Partner with engineering teams to establish reliable and scalable platform patterns.
• Create technical documentation, runbooks, and knowledge‑sharing practices that improve the team's operational maturity.
• Participate in a periodic on‑call rotation supporting 24/7 reliability.

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

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in software, systems, platform, DevOps, SRE, or related engineering roles.
• 3+ years experience operating or troubleshooting distributed systems in production.
• Experience building or operating distributed systems, high‑availability architectures, data replication, and fault‑tolerant platforms.
• Hands‑on experience with one or more distributed platforms such as Kafka, Redis, Elasticsearch, Spark, Airflow, or similar technologies.
• Ability and willingness to learn and operate across a broad technology portfolio.

Preferred Qualifications

• Demonstrated experience with debugging, incident response, and performance‑tuning.
• Experience with automation or software development using Java, Go, Python, or similar.
• Experience managing and building services on cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes.
• Experience collaborating with multiple engineering teams on architecture and production readiness.
• Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.

Medallia is committed to equal pay and transparency. The annual base salary range for this position is $138,000 - $205,000. 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.