Staff Site Reliability Engineer, GovCloud

Medallia • Mclean, VA

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

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.

We are growing our GovCloud team and looking for a Staff Site Reliability Engineer to help scale how we operate Medallia’s US public-sector cloud platform. You will support federal agencies and other regulated customers in a highly available, secure, and compliant environment built on AWS GovCloud and Kubernetes. This is a hybrid role based near Tysons, Virginia, with regular in-office collaboration and remote flexibility. As a Staff Engineer, you will provide technical leadership — improving how we run the platform, mentoring teammates, and driving reliability improvements across teams — while still being hands-on in production.

Success in this role means delivering change safely in a regulated environment: strong automation, clear documentation, disciplined operations, and calm incident response under pressure.

Requirements

• Must reside in the United States and be legally authorized to work in the US without sponsorship.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in Computer Science or a 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 infrastructure-as-code tools
• Git and CI/CD pipelines
• Linux and foundational systems concepts (networking, DNS, TLS/certificates)
• PostgreSQL (or comparable relational databases) in production — replication, backups, and performance tuning
• Proficiency in Python and/or Go experience to build automation scripts, operational tooling, and infrastructure services.
• 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.

Nice To Haves

• Experience operating in FedRAMP, AWS GovCloud, or other regulated or compliance-heavy cloud environments.
• Familiarity with security and compliance practices such as FIPS, vulnerability management, and controlled production change processes.
• Experience with observability and logging platforms in enterprise production environments.
• Deep operational expertise with PostgreSQL (HA/replication, tuning, backup and recovery); familiarity with data/platform technologies such as Redis and Kafka.
• Experience supporting federal agencies or public-sector customers.
• Exposure to government networking and security requirements.
• Experience with tools such as Jenkins, Argo CD, and GitHub Enterprise.
• Excellent collaboration skills and a strong willingness to learn.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate highly available, secure cloud infrastructure on AWS, 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 — for secure, segmented, highly available connectivity.
• Operate and tune production PostgreSQL — high availability and replication, backups and recovery, query and performance optimization, version upgrades, and capacity planning — as part of the platform's data tier.
• 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.
• Candidates based in the Tysons vicinity will be prioritized as this role is Hybrid, 3 days per week onsite.

Benefits

• 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.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Associate degree