Software Engineering, Staff

Overview

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.

The Role and Team

At Medallia, our Nexus Collection & Data Platform team builds and operates the critical backend services that power how surveys are executed, distributed, processed, and collected across Nexus, Medallia’s next-generation experience management platform.

Our systems sit at the core of Nexus’s data platform and support large-scale, highly available workloads across many enterprise customers. The team owns services and capabilities related to survey execution, distribution, response processing, webhooks, messaging integrations, and the streaming pipelines that turn raw collection events into reliable, reportable data.

As Nexus continues to scale, we are evolving these systems to improve performance, reliability, scalability, and operational efficiency while building out key parts of the platform from the ground up on a modern, cloud-native stack.

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer who enjoys solving challenging backend and distributed systems problems, working with high-throughput streaming services, and building reliable software that operates at enterprise scale. You will work closely with experienced engineers, Product Management, QA, and other platform teams to design and deliver capabilities that directly impact how millions of surveys and responses are processed across Nexus. This role is based remotely in Pune. Candidates for this position are required to reside within the Pune metropolitan area. Relocation support is not available at this time.

Responsibilities

• Drive resolution on open, cross-cutting architectural questions — Nexus has several live ones at any given time (e.g., which store owns a given workload and why, how a materialization strategy should be chosen and validated, how a new enrichment type should integrate without violating existing invariants). You're expected to drive these to a documented, defensible decision — not just have an opinion on them.
• Own the integrity of the platform's core data invariants across teams — multi-tenant isolation via the composite entity key model, the rule that enrichments never rewrite interaction data, and that row-level access is enforced on views rather than scattered through application logic. When a new feature threatens one of these, you're the engineer who catches it before it ships.
• Design the pipeline and schema evolution patterns other teams build against — e.g., how a dataset schema can evolve without migrations or downtime, how a new interaction type gets onboarded, how an enrichment's output reaches reporting without duplicating or destabilizing existing views. Lead technical design for major cross-team initiatives — examples at this scale: extending the platform to ingest data originating from Medallia's existing products (MEC) alongside Nexus-native data, designing how AI agents (survey-building assistants, conversational feedback collection) integrate with the core data model via MCP/A2A without becoming a second, inconsistent source of truth.
• Evaluate and make build-vs-buy and store-selection decisions with real stakes — e.g., assessing whether a given workload belongs on a relational store, a wide-column store, or an OLAP engine, and what the actual operational and consistency trade-offs are, backed by a POC or benchmark rather than a hunch.
• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers on distributed systems design, data modeling for multi-tenant correctness, and how to reason about trade-offs in a system where "simple and wrong" fails silently and expensively.
• Represent engineering in architecture and design reviews across team boundaries, and be a primary author of the architecture documentation the rest of the organization builds against.
• Get hands-on when it matters — staff-level scope doesn't mean stepping back from code. You'll personally build the hardest, highest-leverage pieces of a cross-cutting initiative, especially where the design risk is too high to hand off before it's proven out.
• Improve how the platform is operated at scale — reliability, observability, and incident response patterns that work across both the application and data layers, not just within one service's boundary.
• Use AI-assisted development tools responsibly, and set the bar for how your teams evaluate AI-generated code for correctness, security, and long-term maintainability.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of technical leadership beyond your own individual contributions — driving decisions, designs, or initiatives that other engineers and teams built on top of.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems — you can reason rigorously about consistency models, failure modes, data consistency guarantees, and the real trade-offs behind an architectural decision, not just the vocabulary.
• Strong backend engineering background, ideally spanning more than one language/stack (e.g., Java and TypeScript/Node.js, or equivalent) — this role operates across Nexus Core and the Data Platform, and needs to be credible in both.
• Demonstrated experience with event-driven and streaming architectures (Kafka or equivalent, plus a stream processor such as Flink, Spark Streaming, or Kafka Streams).
• Deep experience with relational and/or wide-column data stores at scale, including schema design for systems that can't tolerate downtime or destructive changes.
• Proven experience designing for multi-tenant SaaS correctness — tenant isolation, authorization models, and the discipline required when a design mistake doesn't just cause a bug, it causes a data leak between customers.
• A track record of making and defending hard technical trade-off decisions in writing — RFCs, design docs, or equivalent — and bringing skeptical stakeholders to alignment.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and influencing technical direction without direct management authority.
• Excellent written and verbal communication — at this level, your technical judgment is only as useful as your ability to convey it clearly to engineers, product, and leadership.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience designing row-level or policy-based authorization systems, especially ones enforced at the data/view layer rather than purely in application code.
• Experience with identity resolution systems — matching, merging, and the operational cost of getting profile/entity resolution wrong at scale.
• Experience integrating LLM-based agents or tools into a production platform, especially using protocols like MCP (Model Context Protocol) or agent-to-agent (A2A) coordination.
• Experience leading a platform migration or hybrid-integration effort — e.g., bringing a legacy system's data into a new platform without forcing customers through a disruptive migration.
• Background in customer experience management, survey platforms, or voice-of-customer systems.
• Experience as a technical lead on a greenfield platform build, with scars to show for the early architectural bets that worked and the ones that didn't. At Medallia, we celebrate diversity and recognize the value it brings to our customers and employees. Medallia is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age (40 and over), disability, genetic information, veteran status or military service, or any other status protected by state or local law. Individuals with a disability who need an accommodation to apply please contact us at [email protected]. For information regarding how Medallia collects and uses personal information, please review our Privacy Policies. Applications will be accepted for 30 days from the date this role was posted or until the role has been filled.