Staff SRE: GovCloud Platform Lead (Hybrid)

Medallia, Inc.; McLean (VA); Hybrid; USD 159,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Medallia, Inc. is seeking a Staff Site Reliability Engineer to design, build, and run a highly available GovCloud-based platform for federal and regulated customers. The role combines hands-on engineering with technical leadership in a hybrid Tysons, VA setting, balancing on-site collaboration with remote work flexibility.

You will mentor teams, drive reliability improvements, and contribute to IaC workflows, incident response, and secure, compliant operations across a complex cloud environment.

Qualifications

• Must reside in the U.S. and hold U.S. Citizenship or a Green Card (Lawful Permanent Resident) to meet AWS GovCloud compliance requirements.
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent in Computer Science or related field.
• 8+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, platform engineering, DevOps, or related production infrastructure roles - or 5+ years with demonstrated Staff-level scope (technical leadership, cross-team delivery, incident ownership, and platform/IaC ownership).
• Production experience with: Kubernetes; AWS core services (IAM, compute, object storage, encryption/key management) and AWS cloud networking (VPC design, routing, security groups, load balancing, VPC endpoints/PrivateLink, Transit Gateway, DNS); Terraform or comparable IaC tools; Git and CI/CD pipelines; Linux and foundational systems concepts; PostgreSQL in production.
• Programming and Automation: Proficiency in Python and/or Go experience to build automation scripts, operational tooling, and infrastructure services.
• Incident & Change Management: Experience troubleshooting production incidents, conducting root-cause analysis (RCA), and following change management processes.
• Experience participating in a production on-call rotation.
• Experience troubleshooting complex technical issues and writing clear documentation, runbooks and incident post-mortems.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate highly available, secure cloud infrastructure on AWS GovCloud, including networking, identity/access management, Kubernetes clusters, DNS, certificates, and shared platform services.
• Design and operate AWS cloud networking end-to-end - VPC architecture, subnetting and routing, security groups/NACLs, VPC endpoints/PrivateLink, Transit Gateway, load balancing, and DNS.
• Operate and tune production PostgreSQL - high availability and replication, backups and recovery, query and performance optimization, version upgrades, and capacity planning.
• Ensure the reliability and availability of Medallia applications and infrastructure by monitoring systems, responding to incidents, and eliminating recurring operational problems.
• Develop and maintain Infrastructure-as-Code (primarily Terraform) and Kubernetes deployment workflows using Git, CI/CD, and modern GitOps practices.
• Improve observability across metrics, logs, and uptime monitoring; tune alerting to reduce noise and speed up diagnosis.
• Partner with software engineering, security, release management, and customer-facing teams to deploy changes safely, resolve production issues, and improve operability.
• Lead or contribute to platform upgrades, security patching, and compliance-driven maintenance in a regulated cloud environment.
• Participate in an on-call rotation and help improve incident response, communication, and post-incident follow-through.
• Document systems and operational procedures clearly so others can run and improve the platform.
• Use AI-assisted tooling responsibly, with attention to security, privacy, and customer data boundaries.
• Mentor engineers and help raise engineering standards as the GovCloud platform and team grow.

Skills

Python

Go

Automation scripting

Incident management

Documentation

On-call experience

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Kubernetes

AWS core services

Terraform

Git

CI/CD

Linux

PostgreSQL

Job description

Medallia, Inc. is seeking a Staff Site Reliability Engineer to design, build, and run a highly available GovCloud-based platform for federal and regulated customers. The role combines hands-on engineering with technical leadership in a hybrid Tysons, VA setting, balancing on-site collaboration with remote work flexibility.

You will mentor teams, drive reliability improvements, and contribute to IaC workflows, incident response, and secure, compliant operations across a complex cloud environment.