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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

MediaAlpha is committed to fostering, cultivating, and maintaining a culture of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Our philosophy and actions are built on the premise that as an employer and citizens of our communities, we can create opportunities for lasting change. 

MediaAlpha will consider qualified applicants, including those with criminal histories, in a manner consistent with state and local "Fair Chance" laws. We are also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified applicants with disabilities and disabled veterans in our application process. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, please contact us at peopleops@mediaalpha.com or (213) 316-6256.