Principal Software Engineer - Student Lifecycle Platform

WGU; Salt Lake City (UT); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

WGU is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to serve as the primary technical leader, shipping production software and setting engineering standards across teams.

This role drives AI-assisted development, cloud-native architecture, and platform thinking, guiding decisions with business impact and delivering scalable, observable, and secure solutions for student success at national scale.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Software Engineering, or related field.
• 12+ years of progressive software engineering experience across multiple teams.
• Experience building and operating web apps using Java, REST APIs, SQL, and Git in enterprise environments.
• Experience designing system integrations with third-party and internal platforms.
• Track record in large-scale enterprise IT organizations with established operational processes.

Responsibilities

• Define technical strategy and delivery roadmaps with engineering and product leadership.
• Build and ship production-grade software with established engineering standards.
• Lead Agile delivery practices for planning and execution.
• Design cloud-native architectures with scalability, observability, reliability, security, and operational supportability.
• Evaluate technical decisions through a build, buy, borrow, or bot lens with focus on speed-to-value and sustainability.
• Mentor engineers on modern software practices, AI workflows, and emerging technologies.
• Prototype new tools, frameworks, and architectural patterns through proof-of-value initiatives.
• Drive engineering excellence across multiple teams by establishing repeatable delivery patterns.
• Partner closely with infrastructure, cloud, security, architecture, and product teams as a peer technical leader.
• Identify architectural inefficiencies and technical debt, proposing cost-effective solutions.
• Communicate technical strategy, dependencies, tradeoffs, and risks clearly to executive leadership.
• Support operational readiness, incident response, and day-2 supportability across enterprise systems.

Skills

Java

REST APIs

SQL

Git

Leadership

Mentorship

Education

Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science

Master’s Degree in CS or related field

Tools

Kafka/Confluent

Apache Camel/MuleSoft

AWS (ECS/EKS, Lambda, SNS/SQS, API Gateway, Terraform)

Spring Boot

Kubernetes

Observability tools (Dynatrace/Datadog)

AI/LLM platforms

Job description

WGU is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to serve as the primary technical leader, shipping production software and setting engineering standards across teams.

This role drives AI-assisted development, cloud-native architecture, and platform thinking, guiding decisions with business impact and delivering scalable, observable, and secure solutions for student success at national scale.