Senior Software Engineer - Unified Orchestration

Qualtrics • Provo, UT

4d • Hybrid

About The Position

Qualtrics is hiring a Senior Software Engineer for its Unified Orchestration team, which spans ML Topics and XM Pipeline. The team builds core backend infrastructure to classify and route hundreds of millions of unstructured customer text data points through enrichment systems. The engineer will help run, scale, and improve high-throughput, high-availability production systems, working closely with science, product, and data platform teams. The role includes evaluating model and pipeline advancements with partner teams and safely transitioning selected innovations into production.

The position involves end-to-end ownership of backend features, from scoping and architecture through release and ongoing operational support, along with project leadership and cross-functional coordination. The engineer will evaluate classification models and experiments, design document-routing workflows, improve observability, and integrate new processing capabilities. The role also participates in an on-call rotation of roughly one week every six weeks to resolve customer escalations, mitigate SEVs, and maintain availability.

The team explores AI and orchestration innovations, including automated topic recommendations and combining rules-based and LLM-based classification. Qualtrics uses a hybrid work model: employees work in the office three days a week—Mondays, Thursdays, and one day selected by their organizational leader—and may work from wherever they want on the other days.

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 tools such as Go, TypeScript, Temporal, Kubernetes, or equivalent distributed-systems technology.
• Ability to adapt to the team's technology stack without requiring exact prior matches.
• Sound operational judgment and decisive problem-solving when handling on-call rotations, customer escalations, and SEV events.
• High learning agility.

Nice To Haves

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

Responsibilities

• Take end-to-end ownership of backend features from initial scoping and architecture through production release and ongoing operational support.
• Lead projects and coordinate contributors across science, product, and data platform partners.
• Inspect and review agentically generated code using independent checks to ensure system safety and production readiness.
• Use operational signals, logs, and metrics to identify errors, remove bottlenecks, and prevent dropped documents in distributed workflows.
• Evaluate topic classification models based on 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 identify errors early, maintain processing throughput, and eliminate 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, approximately one week every six weeks, resolving customer escalations, mitigating SEVs, and maintaining high availability.
• Conduct model, LLM, and pipeline experiments in production with applied science teams.
• Drive innovative initiatives, such as automated topic recommendations or combining rules-based and LLM-based classification models.

Benefits

• Annual reimbursement to support personal health and physical or mental wellness goals.
• Premium medical, dental, vision, and life insurance.
• 401(k) matching.
• Team-building offsites and quarterly events.
• Fully stocked snacks and drinks and catered lunches in office locations.
• Hybrid work model with three office days per week and flexibility to work from wherever employees want for the rest of the week.

What This Job Offers

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