Senior Software Engineer - Core AI
Qualtrics · Seattle, WA
$168,000–$221,000from the description
Jul 2, 2026
Seattle, WA
Jul 20, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
This role sits on the foundational AI infrastructure team responsible for building and maintaining the end-to-end machine learning platform that internal data scientists and ML engineers rely on. Day-to-day work centers on designing backend services and data pipelines within AWS SageMaker Unified Studio, operating a medallion data architecture, and developing self-service tooling to streamline the ML lifecycle. It suits a backend-strong engineer with distributed systems and AWS data platform experience who is comfortable with on-call responsibilities and mentoring peers.
Senior level · 4+ years · Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
Posted 4 times — it's one opening, so apply once.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 1,750 people in the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 650–2,300
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $170,959 (middle half $135,720–$216,519). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (6)
The compensation range ($168,000–$221,000/year) is explicitly labeled as the Washington State base pay transparency range; actual pay may vary by location.
The JD states 'Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field, or suitable industry experience' — because equivalent experience is explicitly accepted, this is not a hard degree gate.
AWS CDK is listed under requirements with the qualifier 'e.g.' ('familiarity with infrastructure-as-code (e.g. AWS CDK)'), meaning the hard gate is on infrastructure-as-code capability; AWS CDK is the named example and is treated as the required skill with common alternatives implied.
SageMaker, DataZone, Lake Formation, Glue, DynamoDB, and Lambda appear in the 'How You'll Grow' narrative and/or are framed as 'strong plus' in the requirements section — they are preferred rather than hard gates.
Java, TypeScript, and Go are explicitly called out as 'a plus' alongside the required Python, so they are preferred; they are grouped as alternatives since the JD treats them interchangeably as secondary language familiarity.
The role follows a hybrid model (3 days/week in-office), so it is not fully remote.
Read the full posting
The employer publishes the full description on their own site — read it there ↗. Or sign in to read it here — it's free, and it also lets you track this application.