Senior Software Engineer - Unified Orchestration

Qualtrics • Reston, VA

9h • $139,000 - $169,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

The Senior Software Engineer will work on Qualtrics’ Unified Orchestration team, spanning ML Topics and XM Pipeline. The team builds backend infrastructure that classifies and routes customer text documents through enrichment systems. The role focuses on running, scaling, and improving high-throughput, high-availability production systems while collaborating with science, product, and data platform teams. The engineer will evaluate model and pipeline advancements with partners and take ownership of transitioning selected innovations safely into production.

The role includes end-to-end ownership of backend features, project leadership across functions, and operational support for distributed workflows. It also offers opportunities to lead projects, conduct model and pipeline experiments alongside applied science teams, and work on emerging initiatives such as automated topic recommendations and combined rules-based and LLM-based classification.

The position follows Qualtrics’ hybrid work model: employees work in the office three days a week—Mondays, Thursdays, and one additional day selected by the organizational leader—and may work from their preferred location for the rest of the week. The team participates in an on-call rotation of roughly one week every six weeks.

The Virginia base annual pay transparency range is $139,000–$169,000. A sign-on bonus and restricted stock units may be included in an employment offer; base pay varies with location and job-related factors.

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 cross-functional coordination.
• Practical operational experience with production monitoring, alerting, troubleshooting, scaling, and database technologies.
• Practical familiarity with Go, TypeScript, Temporal, Kubernetes, or equivalent distributed-systems technologies.
• Ability to adapt to the team’s technology stack without requiring an exact prior technology match.
• Sound operational judgment and decisive problem-solving when handling on-call rotations, customer escalations, and SEV events.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with LLMs, model evaluation, or ML experimentation pipelines.
• Hands-on model tuning or evaluation experience, particularly for ML Topics.

Responsibilities

• Take end-to-end ownership of backend features, from scoping and architecture through production release and ongoing operational support.
• Lead projects and coordinate contributors across science, product, data platform, and other cross-functional partners.
• Review agentically generated code using independent checks to ensure safety and production readiness.
• Use operational signals, logs, and metrics to identify errors, eliminate bottlenecks, and prevent dropped documents in distributed workflows.
• Evaluate topic classification models by comparing production performance, computational cost, quality, and customer experience, and deploy successful experiments.
• Design, build, and maintain high-throughput backend workflows that segment and route documents to enrichment services.
• Implement telemetry and monitoring to detect system errors early, maintain throughput, and prevent dropped documents.
• Partner with data platform and downstream enrichment teams to integrate document-processing capabilities into the core pipeline.
• Participate in the team’s on-call rotation, resolve customer escalations, mitigate SEV events, and help maintain high availability.
• Evaluate model and pipeline advancements with science and product partners and transition selected innovations into production.

Benefits

• Annual Experience Bonus funding for an experience of the employee’s choosing.
• Annual Global Wellness Benefit reimbursement for personal health and physical or mental wellness goals.
• Medical insurance.
• Dental insurance.
• Vision insurance.
• Life insurance.
• Disability benefits.
• 401(k) with matching.
• Paid time off.
• Mental health benefits.
• Team-building offsites and quarterly events.
• Stocked snacks and drinks and catered lunches in office locations.
• A sign-on bonus and restricted stock units may be included in an employment offer.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed