Systems Engineer I

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 microphone 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.

Systems Engineer I

Why We Have This Role

As a Systems Engineer I on the Observability Infrastructure team, you will design, build, and operate the critical services that connect cause and effect across the entire company. Your work empowers every engineer at Qualtrics to understand system status, correlate internal telemetry directly with customer impact and significantly reduce Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR). Working closely with cross-functional partners across infrastructure, security, and application engineering, you will optimize observability tooling to speed up time-to-resolution when issues occur. You'll solve complex, high-throughput data challenges in a collaborative, direct, and non-bureaucratic environment.

How You’ll Find Success

• Deep Technical Curiosity: Demonstrates hands-on knowledge of Linux systems, telemetry data streams, and modern observability tooling, driven by a desire to understand complex systems.

• Customer-Obsessed Collaboration: Listens closely to internal engineering teams to build intuitive visibility platforms that turn raw operational data into actionable insights.

• Automate Everything Mindset: Leverages Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible) to eliminate operational toil and maintain reliable, self-healing telemetry pipelines.

• Scalable & Rigorous Design: Thinks critically about system boundaries, designing visibility tooling capable of processing high-volume operational metrics without compromising performance.

• Reliability & Observability Advocate: Applies strong analytical skills to configure robust monitoring, tracing, and log aggregation (Prometheus, Grafana, Clickhouse/Splunk) to diagnose and resolve production issues quickly.

How You’ll Grow

• Gain deep expertise in enterprise observability architectures, learning how to collect, correlate, and visualize data from thousands of microservices at scale.

• Develop end-to-end system design skills in a high-growth, agile setting, learning how to engineer for global availability and high-throughput data streams.

• Accelerate your career through rigorous design reviews, mentorship from senior engineers, and exposure to cutting-edge cloud infrastructure.

Things You’ll Do

• Accelerate incident resolution and improve system availability by building and maintaining platform-wide observability tools that correlate technical metrics directly with customer impact.

• Reduce operational toil and developer friction by designing automated IaC modules, reusable telemetry components, and standardized monitoring frameworks.

• Modernize infrastructure visibility by helping define standards for container orchestration telemetry, service mesh observability, and distributed tracing.

• Drive platform availability by ramping up into an independent primary on-call rotation-following structured onboarding, runbook drills, and shadowing-and implementing reliability fixes identified in blameless post-mortems.

• Build robust data and platform pipelines using Go, Python, or Bash to automate observability workflows and ensure smooth service scaling.

What We’re Looking For On Your Resume

• Experience or strong project work demonstrating Linux system administration, observability platforms (Grafana, Prometheus, Clickhouse/Splunk), and core networking protocols (TCP/IP, HTTP, DNS).

• Proven proficiency in at least one object-oriented or systems programming language (Go, Python, Java) along with scripting capabilities (Bash).

• Demonstrated understanding of modern containerization (Docker) and container orchestration concepts (Kubernetes/EKS).

• Clear track record of software engineering fundamentals: algorithms, data structures, unit testing, code reviews, and disciplined QA practices.

• B.S. in Computer Science (or equivalent practical experience) with 1+ years of exposure to cloud environments (AWS), Infrastructure-as-Code, or telemetry systems.

What You Should Know About This Team

• Our mission directly protects customer experience: We connect cause and effect across Qualtrics, creating clean, simple correlations between infrastructure status and customer impact to help engineers drive incidents to zero.

• We operate at massive telemetry scale: Our visibility services process metrics, logs, and traces from thousands of hosts globally, requiring high-throughput data infrastructure that never misses a beat.

• We foster high technical standards: Operating alongside all platform and developer experience teams at Qualtrics, we maintain an open, transparent culture centered around rigorous design reviews, direct feedback, and continuous career growth.

Our Team’s Favorite Perks and Benefits

• Annual Leave: 25 annual leave days per annum plus an additional day for each year of service (to a max of 5)

• Private Medical Insurance - health & dental cover for you and your dependents

• Wellness - can be reimbursed for a variety of wellness activities via our dedicated platform

• Group Life & Income Protection Insurance

• Free breakfasts, lunches, snacks, and drinks for everyone in the 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. #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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