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

• 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.