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Salary: USD 139,000 - 169,000 / annual
Qualtrics is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join the Unified Orchestration team, which builds core backend infrastructure for processing hundreds of millions of unstructured customer text data points. The team spans ML Topics (topic detection and AI model enrichment) and XM Pipeline (high-volume document routing and orchestration), serving over 18,000 clients globally.
In this role, you will take end-to-end ownership of backend features from scoping and architecture through production release and ongoing operational support. You'll lead projects by coordinating across cross-functional partners including science, product, and data platform teams. Key responsibilities include:
- Optimizing classification and AI ROI by evaluating topic classification models on production performance, computational cost, quality, and customer experience, then deploying winning experiments
- Strengthening pipeline architecture by designing and maintaining high-throughput backend workflows that segment and route documents to enrichment services
- Enhancing system observability through advanced telemetry and monitoring to catch errors early, maintain throughput, and eliminate dropped documents
- Expanding platform capabilities by partnering with data platform and downstream enrichment teams to integrate new document processing capabilities
- Maintaining operational health through participation in on-call rotation (approximately one week every six weeks) to resolve escalations, mitigate SEVs, and ensure high availability
- Rigorously inspecting and reviewing agentically generated code using independent checks to ensure system safety and production readiness
- Leveraging operational signals, logs, and metrics to identify errors and eliminate bottlenecks in distributed workflows
You'll have opportunities to step into project leadership and feature-lead responsibilities, build hands-on expertise in conducting model, LLM, and pipeline experiments in production, deepen mastery of high-throughput distributed systems and modern orchestration patterns, and drive innovative initiatives such as automated topic recommendations or combined rules-based and LLM-based classification models.
Qualtrics operates a hybrid work model with in-office requirements three days per week (Mondays, Thursdays, plus one day selected by your organizational leader).
REQUIREMENTS:
- Demonstrated experience building, scaling, and operating high-throughput, high-availability backend services in distributed environments
- Proven track record of feature ownership or project leadership, including driving cross-functional coordination
- Practical operational experience with production monitoring, alerting, troubleshooting, scaling, and database technologies
- Experience with LLMs, model evaluation, or ML experimentation pipelines (hands-on tuning or evaluation is a plus, particularly for ML Topics)
- Practical familiarity with tools such as Go, TypeScript, Temporal, Kubernetes, or equivalent distributed systems tech stacks
- High learning agility to adapt to the team's tech stack without requiring exact prior matches
