Staff Data Scientist: Semantic Substrate Incubation

Why We Have This Role

How You’ll Find Success

• Thrives in Ambiguity: Operates with a zero-to-one startup mentality. You don't need a map; you look at complex unstructured data chaos and naturally enjoy building foundational AI products and data pipelines from scratch.
• Bridges Science and Engineering: Fluidly moves between deep applied AI research and robust production engineering ensuring brilliant theories actually scale in production.
• Customer-Centric Translator: Enjoys working directly with pilot partners and customers listening to their unique business pain points and translating them into technical requirements and concrete industry ontologies.
• Principled Technical Leader: Takes ownership of the technical vision setting a high bar for architectural excellence while mentoring and elevating the engineering team around you.
• Rigorous and Evidence-Driven: Rejects guesswork. You lean heavily on simulation validation and off-policy evaluation to ensure AI recommendations are grounded in reality.

How You’ll Grow

• Pioneer Agentic AI: You will be at the absolute bleeding edge of LLM orchestration and world modeling setting industry standards for how enterprises deploy autonomous agents.
• Expand Technical Authorship: Refine your voice as an industry thought leader with active support to publish papers write technical books or speak at major global AI conferences.
• Executive & Strategic Visibility: Shape the foundational AI product roadmap of the company giving you direct influence over strategic business decisions and high-level customer relationships.

Things You’ll Do

• Map fragmented data to human-readable terms by leading the discovery and mapping of raw event logs to Vertical Ontologies (Industry Knowledge Packs).
• Accelerate AI accuracy by 60% by designing and deploying a Concept Graph that anchors the substrate utilizing verified profile IDs instead of session data for memory.
• Train autonomous agents efficiently by building the logic for Reward Signal Extraction and Context-Aware actioning to infer KPIs directly from interaction logs avoiding traditional delayed-reward bottlenecks.
• Reduce agentic action risk by 40% by utilizing Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) and action-conditional world models to simulate high-value scenarios and ground recommendations.
• Avoid the "Services Trap" and enable scale by engineering automated systems that allow 80% of the team's context mapping to be executed seamlessly without manual intervention.

What We’re Looking For On Your Resume

• A Proven Tracker Record in AI/ML: Broad capability delivering high-impact AI systems at scale (typically requires around 10+ years of professional data science experience).
• Deep Graph Expertise: Hands-on experience designing implementing and querying graph databases with specific deep technical proficiency in AWS Neptune and SPARQL.
• Production-Level Data Pipelines: Extensive experience with Apache Spark (PySpark/Scala) for large-scale distributed data processing and ETL optimization on massive datasets.
• Modern LLM Orchestration: Direct practical experience building sophisticated applications using frameworks like LangChain LlamaIndex or equivalent agentic workflows.
• Cloud Architecture: Strong hands-on backend and infrastructure skills utilizing Python and the AWS ecosystem (EC2 Lambda S3 CloudFormation CDK or Terraform).

What You Should Know About This Team

Our Team’s Favorite Perks and Benefits

• Dedicated Growth Time: We spend 10% of our time every quarter on individual engineering growth activities research exploration and passion projects.
• Continuous Learning Stipend: Receive an annual stipend for technical books research papers and subscriptions to keep your skills at the absolute cutting edge.
• Conference & Publication Support: Fully covered travel and attendance expenses when you are selected to present research or speak at major industry AI conferences.
• Top-Tier Health & Wellness: Comprehensive global health dental and vision coverage alongside flexible time-off policies to ensure you stay energized.

What We Do

Qualtrics is trusted by thousands of the world’s best organizations to power exceptional customer and employee experiences that build deep human connections increase customer loyalty boost employee engagement and drive business success. Our advanced AI and specialized Experience Agents™ allow businesses and governments to proactively interact with customers and employees in personalized ways across every channel and touchpoint respond in-the-moment to fix or improve experiences and stay across the latest market trends and opportunities. Our vision as an organization is to improve the human experience.

Why Work With Us

We're a place where strategic risks are encouraged & complex problems get solved together. Where nimble teams are empowered to set aggressive goals & move fast to win. A place that makes you feel safe as your authentic self. Where everyday work results in growth. And most importantly where what you do matters. That's why we work at Qualtrics.

Gallery