Senior Platform Engineer

Medallia•Mclean, VA

About The Position

Medallia is seeking a Senior Platform Engineer to build and operate its platform through production-grade automation and site reliability engineering practices. This is a high-visibility, cross-functional role requiring the engineer to move between incidents, platform development, and strategic initiatives while delivering careful, reliable work under time pressure. The engineer will use AI-assisted and agentic coding tools as part of day-to-day development and own the platform lifecycle, including provisioning, deployment, scaling, and decommissioning across Kubernetes, cloud, and on-premises environments. The role also involves full-stack production troubleshooting, database and infrastructure hygiene, and end-to-end incident escalation ownership as part of an on-call rotation.

Requirements

At least 5 years of experience in SRE, software development, or platform engineering, including hands-on coding.
Strong software development background and ability to independently build, review, and ship production code.
Fluency with, or willingness to learn and adopt, AI-assisted coding and agentic tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, or Copilot.
Deep Kubernetes experience, including deployments, Helm, GitOps, and canary or blue/green releases.
Depth in at least one cloud platform: AWS or OCI.
Solid understanding of system architecture, including databases, message queues, load balancing, auto-scaling, caching, and API layers.
Ability to own both platform development and operations.
Incident and change management experience in customer-facing production environments.
Python and Go scripting or development skills.
Proven ability to manage incidents, builds, and strategic work concurrently without dropping responsibilities.

Nice To Haves

Experience with infrastructure as code, such as Terraform, Ansible, or CloudFormation.
Relational and NoSQL database operations experience with PostgreSQL, Cassandra, or MongoDB, including migration and cloning workflows.
CI/CD ownership experience with Jenkins or ArgoCD.
Track record of leading cross-team technical initiatives.
Security fundamentals, including secrets management and SSL/certificate lifecycle.

Responsibilities

Build automation and tooling that eliminates manual operations work rather than merely patching problems.
Use AI coding assistants and agentic workflows as a core part of daily engineering.
Own platform provisioning, deployment strategies such as canary and blue/green releases, scaling, and decommissioning across Kubernetes, cloud, and on-premises environments.
Troubleshoot production issues across databases, APIs, and infrastructure.
Maintain database and infrastructure hygiene, including cloning, migration, decommissioning, and orphan cleanup without disrupting production.
Participate in the on-call rotation and own escalations end to end.
Deliver meticulous, high-quality work under time pressure.