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.
Staff Software Engineer, Foundation - Reston
Why We Have This Role
Qualtrics is seeking a Staff Software Engineer (Tech Lead) to help build our next-generation text analytics services and further existing capabilities to help customers visualize and understand hundreds of millions of unstructured text data points. You will work across a breadth of technologies, touching all levels of the stack from LLM prompts, Kubernetes, databases, and cloud platforms. You will participate in and lead design and architecture discussions with your peers, sharing your expertise and learning from their experiences.
Success comes from delivering high impact features and collaborating effectively with cross-functional teams across foundations engineering and product managers. We expect our Tech Leads to be excellent communicators who can influence the technical direction of the team and inspire others to deliver high-quality, innovative solutions. As a Staff Software Engineer (Tech Lead) on our team, you'll be expected to set the technical direction for the team, actively participating in design and architecture discussions, as well as reviewing the work of others.
How You’ll Find Success
- You will take ownership of features and coordinate contributors (cross-teams and functions) to ensure development and delivery. Your day-to-day work will involve driving operational excellence, quality improvements, and mentoring junior engineers.
- Designing scalable and maintainable software solutions that drive business impact by providing foundational text analytics services.
- Set the technical direction for the engineering team that owns data classification space and proactively identifying areas for technical innovations.
- Delivering high-quality code while balancing speed and reliability will be key to your impact.
- Proactively review coding, testing standards of team and designs of cross team features
How You’ll Grow
- You will expand your leadership capabilities by owning complex projects and influencing architectural decisions.
- Active collaboration with product owners, principle engineers to strategically align the road map with the team's technical vision and organization north star.
- Continuous learning through challenging technical problems, peer feedback, and participating in code reviews will sharpen your craft.
- Opportunities to mentor junior engineers and contribute to strategic planning will accelerate your career progression.
Things You’ll Do
- Set the technical direction for the team, driving the overall architecture and design of the platform
- Review and provide feedback on the work of other engineers, ensuring high-quality, maintainable code
- Develop innovative backend services and APIs to extend our text analytics platform
- Teach and mentor other engineers, helping them grow their skills and expertise
- Drive new innovation by working closely with Machine Learning and Applied Science engineering teams to leverage state-of-the-art in ML and LLMs
- Participate in scrum meetings, design+architecture sessions, collaborate with engineers, product, and quality to prioritize and ship features and improvements
What We’re Looking For On Your Resume
- 8+ years of relevant experience, deeply technical
- Proven track record of leading technical initiatives and setting direction for engineering teams
- Strong background in systems architecture, ability to create high level designs
- Extensive backend development experience in one or more languages like TypeScript, Java, Scala, JavaScript, Go, Python, C#
- Practical experience working with cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure)
- Passion for delivering products end-to-end: from ideation through planning and scoping to implementation and experimental A/B testing, analytics
- Familiarity with different database technologies
- Architecting systems that operate on large quantities of data
- Experience with professional software engineering practices (e.g., unit testing, code reviews, design documents)
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or suitable industry experience
- Experience with ElasticSearch or OpenSearch for data indexing, search, and analytics
- Familiarity with Agile software development methodologies and best practices
- Contributions to open-source projects or a portfolio of personal projects
What You Should Know About This Team
- This team is responsible for analyzing and finding insights from omni channel text.
- Our work is core to Qualtrics' mission to improve the human experience, and we have a great balance of greenfields and brownfields to explore.
- We are looking for an engineer who also has a passion for details and who works well with others across disciplines, and can empathize with customers and understand their business needs in the experience domain.
Our Team’s Favorite Perks and Benefits
- Qualtrics Annual Experience Bonus ($1,800) can be used for an experience of your choosing: concerts, vacation, event tickets, etc.
- Global Wellness Benefit ($1,200) reimburses employees to stay on top of their health and wellness
- Quarterly team offsite team building events
- Great standard benefits package (medical, dental, vision, life insurance, 401k, etc.)
- Snacks, drinks, and free lunches in our office
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.
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.
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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