Staff Software Engineer - Applied AI

Hybrid role: 2 days/week in office

Role Overview

As a Staff Machine Learning Engineer at MediaAlpha, you will lead the design and development of LLM-powered applications for our internal teams and ad serving platform. You will be accountable for end-to-end systems: owning strategy, architecture, implementation, and operations. You will collaborate with engineering, product, and business stakeholders to deliver intelligent systems that solve real business problems.

The ideal candidate is a strong engineer with hands-on experience building LLM-powered applications in production, who works well across organizational boundaries and improves the conditions of any area they are in. We are an intentionally small organization, designed for agility, speed, and workability.

Responsibilities

• Own the full software development lifecycle of LLM-powered systems, from requirements through production deployment and operational health.
• Design and implement retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, tool-use patterns, and multi-step reasoning workflows.
• Integrate LLM-based services into MediaAlpha's products, internal tools, and data ecosystem.
• Drive architectural decisions balancing capability, cost, latency, and maintainability.
• Establish evaluation frameworks and metrics to measure application quality and business impact.
• Work directly with stakeholders to define product capabilities and develop new features and integrations.
• Be a champion of instilling excellence in coding, testing, and quality into the team and culture.
• Mentor engineers on LLM application development patterns and best practices.

Requirements

• 9+ years of experience in software development.
• Experience designing and owning systems end-to-end, including 3-tier architectures, data flows, APIs, deployments, and operational health.
• Strong programming skills in Python, including software engineering methodologies and best practices.
• Hands-on experience building LLM-powered features in production.
• Experience with RAG architectures, including vector databases, embedding models, and retrieval strategies.
• Practical prompt engineering skills with demonstrated ability to iterate and evaluate quality.
• Familiarity with core ML concepts (classification, evaluation metrics, embeddings) and the judgment to know when traditional ML approaches outperform LLM-based solutions.
• Experience with agent frameworks and tool-use patterns (MCP, function calling, etc.).
• Familiarity with cloud environments (AWS preferred: EC2, S3, Bedrock).
• A self-starter who works independently, is comfortable with ambiguity, and pays careful attention to detail.
• Experience collaborating with engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
• Ability to articulate and communicate clearly, concisely, and thoughtfully.
• Organized and self-motivated.
• B.S. required, preferably in a technical discipline (e.g., computer science).

Compensation & Benefits

We are excited to offer a total cash compensation of $157,000 to $291,000 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:

• An annual discretionary 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 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
• 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