Staff Data Scientist: Semantic Substrate Incubation
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.
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 Data Scientist: Semantic Substrate Incubation
Why We Have This Role
At Semantic Substrate Incubation, we are drowning in data but starving for meaning. As our lead data scientist, you will bridge this "Meaning Gap" by turning raw, chaotic event logs into an intelligent, concept-linked graph—the Semantic Brain. You will move past basic chat interfaces to architect an Identity-Anchored World Model that allows LLMs to understand complex enterprise ideas like "High-Value Churn Risk" and drive autonomous, agentic decisions. Working alongside a tight-knit team of researchers and production engineers, your work will directly define how the next generation of AI comprehends the business world.
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
- We Build From Scratch: We are a true zero-to-one incubation team. If you hate bureaucracy and love rapid prototyping and immediate impact, you will thrive here.
- Unmatched Autonomy: We trust our experts. You will have the freedom to steer the technical direction of the Semantic Substrate without being micromanaged.
- Collaboration Over Silos: We work fluidly across applied research, data engineering, and product. No throwing code over the wall—we build together.
- Obsessed with Ground Truth: We aren't building wrappers or hype. We are focused on solving the deepest technical challenges in the enterprise AI space with academic rigor.
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.
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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For full-time positions, this pay range is for base per year; however, base pay offered within this range may vary depending on location, job-related knowledge, education, skills, and experience. A sign-on bonus and restricted stock units may be included in an employment offer. Full-time employees are eligible for medical, dental, vision, life and disability, 401(k) with match, paid time off, a wellness reimbursement, mental health benefits, and an experience bonus. For a detailed look at our benefits, visit Qualtrics US Benefits.
Washington State Base Annual Pay Transparency Range
$206,500—$271,000 USD
Data & ML pay context
Based on 1,321 disclosed Data & ML salaries on RoleSuite, the role pays a median of $165K/year, with most offers between $128K and $209K (10th–90th percentile: $106K–$246K).
This posting lists $207K–$271K, above the $165K market median.
See the full Data & ML salary breakdown →