Platform Architect for Secure Conversational AI

Aimlroles; Salt Lake City (UT); On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Bonuses

Health and dental

Tuition discount

Wellbeing program

11 paid holidays

Flexible paid time off

Job summary

Western Governors University (WGU) is hiring a Principal Software Engineer, AI Platform, to architect and build a new conversational AI platform. You will shape retrieval, inference, orchestration, guardrails, and security across WGU systems, enabling secure, trusted AI-powered experiences.

The role is hands-on, focusing on scalable, observable AI solutions, with leadership in standards, tooling, and production support.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of professional software engineering experience designing, building, and operating production web applications and services.
• 2+ years of hands-on experience building and deploying LLM-powered applications in production environments, including retrieval augmented generation, tool or function calling, and evaluation of AI system performance.
• Experience designing APIs and integration contracts used by internal and external engineering teams.
• Production experience with at least one server-side language such as Java, Python, TypeScript/Node.js, C#, or Go.
• Ability to influence and partner across engineering, architecture, security, governance, and business stakeholders while remaining hands-on.

Responsibilities

• Architect and build a conversational AI platform that supports retrieval over content and data, inference integration, orchestration, tool calling, conversation state management, and multiple application experiences.
• Own the platform’s security and privacy model, ensuring retrieval, generation, and tool execution are authorization-aware and maintain strict student data protections aligned with FERPA requirements.
• Build guardrails and governance capabilities including input and output filtering, escalation workflows, prompt injection resistance, audit logging, and explainability controls.
• Establish evaluation and observability frameworks that measure groundedness, quality, latency, reliability, and cost across AI-powered systems.
• Define MCP servers, tool contracts, APIs, templates, libraries, and reference implementations that enable engineering teams to build AI-powered workflows securely and consistently.
• Design, build, test, operate, and modernize production services, APIs, integrations, and interfaces using modern software engineering practices in a Java and Angular environment on AWS.
• Provide technical leadership through architecture guidance, mentoring, documentation, operational excellence, and production support.

Skills

System architecture

Leadership

Security governance

FERPA compliance

Observability

AI safety concepts

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field

Tools

Java

Angular

AWS

TypeScript/Node.js

Python

Go

C#

Job description

Western Governors University (WGU) is hiring a Principal Software Engineer, AI Platform, to architect and build a new conversational AI platform. You will shape retrieval, inference, orchestration, guardrails, and security across WGU systems, enabling secure, trusted AI-powered experiences.

The role is hands-on, focusing on scalable, observable AI solutions, with leadership in standards, tooling, and production support.