Sr. Staff Engineer, DevOps

Role Overview

Sr. Staff Engineer, DevOps

The Sr. Staff Engineer, DevOps owns MediaAlpha's cloud infrastructure and DevOps systems end to end. You are responsible at the system level for their architecture, health, security, and strategic direction. This is a senior individual contributor role. You set your team's standards and technical execution at a System(s)/Team scope. You will drive technical vision, architect secure infrastructure solutions, and push DevOps best practices across the engineering organization. You deliver the most complex, highest-impact technical work on the team while simultaneously raising everyone else's capability through mentorship, standards, and knowledge systems.

The ideal candidate is a hands-on engineer with deep AWS expertise who can balance strategic thinking with operational excellence. You will partner with Engineering, Security, IT, and business stakeholders to deliver on our technical roadmap while maintaining the stability, performance, and security of production systems. You are an engineer lead who shapes how the engineer organization operates, an agent of change who carries organizational standards to your team, and across all of engineering.

Responsibilities

Technical Leadership and Architecture

• Own the architecture, health, and strategic direction of MediaAlpha’s cloud infrastructure and DevOps systems on the Amazon platform.
• Design for scalability, reliability, and security; align work to a co-owned 12-month vision and drive resolution of technical debt.
• Set DevOps best practices and engineering standards across the org: CI/CD pipelines, IaC (Terraform), code review, testing, deployment practices, and security procedures.
• Lead incident response, conduct threat modeling, and drive adoption of modern DevOps and security practices, including multi-region and DR architecture.

Cloud Operations and Execution

• Own the performance, reliability, and cost management (FinOps) of the AWS cloud environment.
• Automate and deploy infrastructure; maintain cloud administration, patching, and vulnerability remediation; troubleshoot existing code and scripts (Terraform, Perl, Python, etc.). 
• Lead major technical projects end to end: break complex efforts into workable plans, manage cross-team dependencies, and keep delivery on track.
• Identify and automate manual processes; keep architecture decision records, runbooks, and project documentation current.
• Respond to ticket requests and escalated incidents as required.

Collaboration, Mentorship, and Standards

• Partner with Engineering, Analytics, Security, and Business teams to define requirements early and shape what gets built across systems you own.
• Mentor engineers through code reviews, design discussions, and pairing; coach for independent decision-making and raise the team’s technical judgment.
• Participate in Tech Leads meetings, cross-team forums, and on-call rotation; present architecture and solutions to peers and leadership.

Experience

• 9+ years of experience in DevOps, cloud infrastructure, or systems engineering
• Building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines, GitHub Actions workflows, and deployment automation.
• Scripting and coding (Terraform, Python, Bash, etc.) for systems engineering and security automation.
• Web application architectures and backend systems, including performance tuning and troubleshooting at scale.
• Administering Linux environments.
• Hands-on experience with AWS, including: EC2, ALB, IAM, VPC, RDS, Route53, CloudWatch, S3, Lambda, ECS, Amazon Linux.

Work Location: Bellevue, WA

Hybrid: 1-2 days/week in-office on Tuesdays / Thursdays.

Compensation & Benefits

We are excited to offer a competitive base pay range of $150,00 to $250,000 per year for this position, based on experience and qualifications. But that's not all - as a valued member of our team, you will also have access to an array of top-notch benefits, including:

• Annual bonus program and participation in our Restricted Stock Unit program
• 100% Employer-paid health, dental, and vision insurance for you, your dependents, and spouse or registered domestic partner
• 100% Employer paid short term disability, long term disability, and life insurance
• 401(k) retirement plan with matching contributions to help you plan for your future
• Open Paid Time Off policy with a birthday day off and 11 holidays 
• Professional development reimbursement along with a subscription to Coursera
• Cell Phone, Wellness, and Internet expense reimbursement, along with a subscription to the Calm App
• 100% fully paid parental leave for team members up to 22 weeks for the primary caregiver and 12 weeks for the secondary caregiver 
• Dog-friendly offices (LA and AZ) along with a $300 pet adoption reimbursement