Senior Software Engineer - Unified Orchestration

Qualtrics•Reston, VA

5d•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 large volumes of unstructured customer text through enrichment systems. The role involves running, scaling, and improving high-throughput, high-availability production systems and collaborating with science, product, and data platform teams to evaluate model and pipeline advancements and safely transition selected innovations into production. The engineer will own backend features end to end, from scoping and architecture through release and operational support, and may lead projects involving cross-functional contributors. The role includes evaluating topic classification models and experiments, strengthening document-routing workflows, improving observability, integrating processing capabilities, and participating in an on-call rotation of roughly one week every six weeks. The team also explores innovations 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 day chosen by the organizational leader—and may work wherever they want for the remainder of the week. The Virginia base annual pay range is $139,000–$169,000 USD. A sign-on bonus and restricted stock units may be included in an offer.

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 technology stacks.
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 tuning or evaluation is a plus, 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, and data platform partners.
Inspect and review agentically generated code using independent checks to ensure 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 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 errors early, maintain processing 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, roughly one week every six weeks, handling customer escalations, mitigating SEVs, and maintaining high availability.

Benefits

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