Staff ML Engineer — LLM & RAG Architect

MediaAlpha; Bellevue (WA); Hybrid; USD 170,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Annual bonus program

Employer-paid health insurance

401(k) with match

Open PTO with Birthday off and 13 paid

Recharge days

LinkedIn Learning reimbursement

Cell phone reimbursement

Calm App subscription

Parental leave up to 22 weeks (primary

Parental leave 12 weeks (secondary)

Dog-friendly offices

Job summary

MediaAlpha, a customer acquisition technology company, seeks a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to lead the design and deployment of LLM-powered applications for internal teams and the ad-serving platform. You will own end-to-end systems, drive RAG architectures, tooling patterns, and multi-step reasoning, and mentor engineers to raise the team's quality.

You will design, implement, and integrate LLM-based services, collaborating with product and business stakeholders while maintaining strong

Qualifications

• 9+ years of software development experience.
• End-to-end system ownership including 3-tier architectures, data flows, APIs, deployments, and health.
• Proficient in Python and production LLM-powered features.
• Experience with RAG architectures, vectors and embeddings.
• Prompt engineering with strong evaluation.
• Familiarity with ML concepts and agent frameworks.
• Cloud experience (AWS preferred).
• BS in a technical field.

Responsibilities

• Own the full software development lifecycle of LLM-powered systems.
• Design and implement retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems and tooling patterns.
• Integrate LLM services into MediaAlpha products and internal tools.
• Drive architecture balancing capability, cost, latency, and maintainability.
• Establish evaluation frameworks and measurable impact.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to define capabilities and features.
• Mentor engineers on LLM development patterns and best practices.

Skills

Python

LLM systems

Software design

Mentoring

Education

BS in Computer Science

Tools

Vector databases

Embedding models

MCP (Agent framework)

Function calling

AWS Bedrock

APIs

Job description

MediaAlpha, a customer acquisition technology company, seeks a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to lead the design and deployment of LLM-powered applications for internal teams and the ad-serving platform. You will own end-to-end systems, drive RAG architectures, tooling patterns, and multi-step reasoning, and mentor engineers to raise the team's quality.

You will design, implement, and integrate LLM-based services, collaborating with product and business stakeholders while maintaining strong