Senior Software Engineer - Unified Orchestration

At Qualtrics, we create software the world’s best brands use to deliver exceptional frontline experiences, build high-performing teams, and design products people love. But we are more than a platform-we are the creators and stewards of the Experience Management category serving over 18K clients globally. Building a category takes grit, determination, and a disdain for convention-but most of all it requires close-knit, high-functioning teams with an unwavering dedication to serving our customers.

When you join one of our teams, you’ll be part of a nimble group that’s empowered to set aggressive goals and move fast to achieve them. Strategic risks are encouraged and complex problems are solved together, by passing the mic and iterating until the best solution comes to light. You won’t have to look to find growth opportunities-ready or not, they’ll find you. From retail to government to healthcare, we’re on a mission to bring humanity, connection, and empathy back to business. Join over 5,000 people across the globe who think that’s work worth doing.

Senior Software Engineer - Unified Orchestration

Why We Have This Role

Qualtrics processes hundreds of millions of unstructured customer text data points, and our Unified Orchestration team-spanning ML Topics and XM Pipeline-builds the core backend infrastructure that classifies and routes these documents through our enrichment systems. In this role, you will help run, scale, and improve high-throughput, high-availability production systems, collaborating closely with science, product, and data platform teams. You will evaluate state-of-the-art model and pipeline advancements alongside science and product partners, then take ownership of transitioning those selected innovations safely into production.

How You'll Find Success

• Taking end-to-end ownership of backend features, from initial scoping and architecture through to production release and ongoing operational support.
• Leading projects by coordinating contributors across cross-functional partners like science, product, and data platform.
• 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, eliminate bottlenecks, and prevent dropped documents in distributed workflows.
• Showing high learning agility to adapt to the team's tech stack (such as Go, TypeScript, Temporal, or Kubernetes) without requiring exact prior matches.
• Applying sound operational judgment and decisive problem-solving when handling on-call rotations, customer escalations, and SEV events.

How You'll Grow

• Step into project leadership and feature-lead responsibilities at the senior level.
• Build hands-on expertise in conducting model, LLM, and pipeline experiments in production alongside applied science teams.
• Deepen your mastery of high-throughput, high-availability distributed systems and modern orchestration patterns.
• Drive less-defined, highly innovative initiatives-such as automated topic recommendations or combining rules-based and LLM-based classification models.

Things You'll Do

• Optimize Classification & AI ROI: Evaluate topic classification models by comparing production performance, computational cost, quality, and customer experience, then deploy winning experiments.
• Strengthen Pipeline Architecture: Design, build, and maintain high-throughput backend workflows that seamlessly segment and route documents to various enrichment services.
• Enhance System Observability: Implement advanced telemetry and monitoring to catch system errors early, maintain high processing throughput, and eliminate dropped documents.
• Expand Platform Capabilities: Partner with data platform and downstream enrichment teams to integrate new document processing capabilities into the core pipeline.
• Maintain Operational Health: Participate in the team's on-call rotation (roughly one week every six weeks) to resolve customer escalations, mitigate SEVs, and ensure continuous high availability.

What We're Looking For On Your Resume

• 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 like Go, TypeScript, Temporal, Kubernetes, or equivalent distributed systems tech stacks.

What You Should Know About This Team

• Dual-Focus Scope: The team operates across ML Topics (topic detection & AI model enrichment) and XM Pipeline (high-volume document routing & orchestration).
• Cross-Functional Synergy: We collaborate closely with product, science, and platform engineering teams to convert research into robust, scalable software.
• Balanced Operational Culture: We maintain operational reliability through an organized on-call rotation (~1 week every 6 weeks) with clear escalation protocols.
• Evolving Problem Space: We continuously explore new frontiers in AI, topic recommendations, and combined rule/LLM classification models.

Our Team's Favorite Perks and Benefits

• Qualtrics Annual Experience Bonus: Dedicated funding to use toward an experience of your choosing (vacation, concerts, events).
• Global Wellness Benefit: Annual reimbursement to support your personal health and physical/mental wellness goals.
• Comprehensive Healthcare & Retirement: Premium medical, dental, vision, life insurance, and 401(k) matching packages.
• Team & Office Perks: Regular team-building offsites, quarterly events, and fully stocked snacks, drinks, and catered lunches in office locations.

The Qualtrics Hybrid Work Model: Our hybrid work model is elegantly simple: we all gather in the office three days a week; Mondays and Thursdays, plus one day selected by your organizational leader. These purposeful in-person days in thoughtfully designed offices help us do our best work and harness the power of collaboration and innovation. For the rest of the week, work where you want, owning the integration of work and life. #hybrid

Qualtrics is an equal opportunity employer meaning that all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, status as a protected veteran, or any other protected characteristic.

Applicants in the United States of America have rights under Federal Employment Laws:Family & Medical Leave Act, Equal Opportunity Employment, Employee Polygraph Protection Act

Qualtrics is committed to the inclusion of all qualified individuals. As part of this commitment, Qualtrics will ensure that persons with disabilities are provided with reasonable accommodations. If reasonable accommodation is needed to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and/or to receive other benefits and privileges of employment, please let your Qualtrics contact/recruiter know.

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For full-time positions, this pay range is for base per year; however, base pay offered within this range may vary depending on location, job-related knowledge, education, skills, and experience. A sign-on bonus and restricted stock units may be included in an employment offer. Full-time employees are eligible for medical, dental, vision, life and disability, 401(k) with match, paid time off, a wellness reimbursement, mental health benefits, and an experience bonus. For a detailed look at our benefits, visit Qualtrics US Benefits.

Virginia Base Annual Pay Transparency Range

$139,000—$169,000 USD