# Sam Nelson > Full-Stack Senior Software Engineer at Qualtrics | Tech Lead | Solution Architect Location: Seattle, Washington, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/samnelson Experienced Full-Stack Software Engineer | Tech Lead | Solution Architect Hello! I'm Sam, a Full-Stack Software Engineer with over 9 years of hands-on experience in driving innovation, leading teams, and delivering impactful solutions. Currently, I thrive as a tech lead at Qualtrics, where I've honed my skills in leading cross-functional teams of up to 6 members, overseeing projects spanning over a year. At Qualtrics, I've spearheaded initiatives that have resulted in substantial cost savings and operational efficiencies. For instance, I collaborated with over 50 teams to seamlessly integrate with my orchestration platform built on AWS with Java, facilitating the transfer of terabytes of customer data and contributing to a significant $7.6M in Annual Contract Value (ACV) savings. Prior to my role at Qualtrics, I spent 3.5 years at Amazon, where I immersed myself in the intricacies of AWS and contributed to the development of innovative solutions. My dedication and expertise were recognized with a patent for an intelligent backfill service, highlighting my commitment to driving technological advancements. I'm passionate about exploring new opportunities where I can leverage my skills and experience to make a meaningful impact. Whether it's solving complex technical challenges, leading transformative projects, or driving innovation, I'm eager to connect and explore potential collaborations. Let's connect! Feel free to reach out to me to discuss how I can contribute to your team or organization's success. ## Work Experience ### Senior Software Engineer @ Qualtrics Jan 2021 – Present | Seattle, Washington • With StateRAMP's passage in 17 states, it affected 1485 customers with $45.9M ACV. I took ownership of a 6 year old legacy platform and wholly re-designed it for robustness and scale to support the orchestration of services to move a customer with flexible data transfer mechanisms. I worked with and evaluated designs across 50+ teams to integrate their services with the new platform to be able to transfer their data to a stateRAMP compliant data center. I led a team of 6 engineers to deliver this year-long project that transfers terabytes of data within 24 hour SLA. As such, we're currently transferring 176 customers in Texas with $7.6M ACV. Java, VertX, SWF, AngularJS, MongoDB, and Victorops. • I deep-dived and collaborated with 5+ teams to design a FedRAMP certified course evaluation system built into Qualtrics, utilizing FSI's data lake. I led a team of 3 engineers to deliver the multi-quarter project that FSI uses to automate distribution of course eval surveys to 225,000 students and over 800 courses. As a result, we were able to save a pivotal customer for renewal and expansion opportunities with the Dept of State and Homeland Security and generate +2.3M (143% YoY) in sales. Java, Javascript, React, Redux, SQL, and Node. • I drove the development of Health Connect - a multi-quarter GA project that connects EHR systems with Qualtrics. With $900K in the pipeline, I collaborated with PM and Sales to define the feature set, design the real-time Health Record ingestion and egestion workflows, and led a team of 3 to bring the project from conception to launch. Working with 7+ teams and a 3rd-party vendor, I optimized Health Connect's performance, increasing TPS by 11x (70 to 800) with caches and JVM tuning. I resolved 19 critical bugs across 4 teams, resulting in a high-quality product with 90% unit test coverage (165 tests), 7/7 API IT, and full E2E automation. Java, Spring, Typescript, Node, Kafka, Lambda, Nomad, Jenkins, Selenium, and Prometheus. ### Software Engineer II @ Qualtrics Jan 2019 – Jan 2021 | Seattle, Washington • Successfully worked with 6 partner teams in implementing data isolation solutions for 20+ SQL tables and 16 data flows, resulting in the successful delivery of a $7.6MM project for Qualtrics' largest contract to date at the time. Trained a v-team of 3 through a bootcamp and led them to deliver the 6+ month project. Utilized AWS KMS and AES-256 encryption to secure the ecosystem built with Typescript, Node, Kafka, Nomad, and SQL database ### Software Development Engineer II @ Amazon Jan 2017 – Jan 2019 | Seattle, Washington • Designed, implemented, and received a patent for an intelligent service that can backfill data in a distributed, automated, and guaranteed way, in Java, preventing over 20 million customers impacted by backfilling their missing data cleanly into various services and databases. Developed with multiple internal services and AWS services: DynamoDB, S3, SQS, Pipelines, RDS, CloudWatch, and Lambda. ### Software Development Engineer I @ Amazon Jan 2015 – Jan 2017 | Seattle, Washington • Worked with senior software developers to create a patented service, in Java, that sends event notifications anytime customers' states match certain designated criteria. Events can have actions registered to take place (e.g. email, SNS, push notification, etc) anytime they occur. In addition to multiple internal services, utilized AWS services during creation: DynamoDB, S3, SQS, SNS, Kinesis, CloudWatch, and SWF. • Designed, implemented, and revamped the Prime Central location on Amazon, in FreeMarker, JSP, and Java, with the introduction of monthly Prime memberships and Sprint partnership memberships. Appropriately handling membership changes, remind me later emails, and membership cancellations, utilizing I18N best practices to facilitate global expansion. • Developed a cancellation actions platform, in Java, that handles all possible cancellations available to Prime customers, leveraging multiple internal services to provide data aggregation of pertinent information related to cancellation, to execute cancellation in an authoritative manner, and to be easy extensible with additional actions, eligibility, and information. ### Software Engineer Intern @ Amazon Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 | Seattle, Washington • Created an easily extensible framework, Canary, in C++ that tests business logic and latency on an active NoSQL distributed database system, which handles more than 8,000,000 tps, providing a way to preemptively encounter problems before clients do and give a clear understanding of how the problem occurred. • Tested over 95% of the more than 1800+ line Canary code base and 100% of functionality with CPPUnitTests and integration tests, providing assurance to clients to use the framework and confidence in the validity of Canary’s outputs. ### Software Engineer Co-op @ Workday Jan 2013 – Jan 2013 | Pleasanton, California • Refactored Workday’s HCM and Financial Enterprise software using GWT and Guice with a 70 member team, creating a complete redesign of the system with MVP architecture. • Updated server sided code to use Spring annotations, allowing for a more abstracted and understandable code base. • Fostered strong testing capabilities using Mockito, Juckito, EasyMock, and JMock, resulting in robust tests to support the single-code line infrastructure. ## Education ### Bachelor of Science in Computer Science Cornell University Jan 2011 – Jan 2015 ### International Baccalaureate Diploma Inglemoor High School Jan 2009 – Jan 2011 ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/samluonelson --- Source: https://flows.cv/samnelson JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/samnelson/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-22