Applied AI Software Engineer at MediaAlpha
Bellevue, WA
$170,000–$260,000from the description
Jul 23, 2026
Bellevue, WA
Jul 24, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A senior individual contributor role focused on building and owning large language model-powered applications end-to-end — from architecture through production operations — for an ad-serving platform and internal tooling. Day-to-day work centers on RAG systems, agent and tool-use patterns, and integrating LLM services into existing data pipelines, alongside mentoring engineers and shaping team practices. Suits an experienced engineer with a production track record in LLM application development.
Staff level · 9+ years · Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA · Bachelor's required · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 70 people in the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 20–100
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $164,459 (middle half $130,334–$195,752). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (7)
The role is explicitly titled 'Staff Machine Learning Engineer' and carries genuine cross-team architectural ownership and mentorship responsibilities, supporting the Staff seniority classification.
SOC is Medium confidence: the role is primarily LLM application software development (15-1252), but the ML/data-science framing (embeddings, evaluation metrics, classification) makes 15-2051 Data Scientists a plausible runner-up.
AWS is listed under Requirements but qualified as 'preferred', so it is treated as preferred rather than a hard gate. Azure and GCP are listed as alternatives since the posting explicitly accepts 'cloud environments' broadly.
The posting mentions two office locations (LA and AZ); the LA CBSA is used as the primary metro since the phone number and company context point to Los Angeles.
B.S. is stated as 'required' in the Requirements section, so the degree requirement is set to Bachelors. The 'preferably in a technical discipline' qualifier applies to the field of study, not to the degree itself.
Specific AWS sub-services named (EC2, S3, Bedrock) are subsumed under the AWS skill rather than emitted separately, as they are illustrative examples within a single parenthetical rather than independently gated requirements.
MCP (Model Context Protocol) and function calling are named as examples of tool-use/agent framework patterns; they are captured under the 'agent frameworks' skill rather than as separate entries.
Read the full posting
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