Senior AI Platform Architect for Secure Conversational AI

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

Benefits offered by this job

Bonuses

Health benefits

Tuition discount (WGU)

Flexible PTO

Job summary

Western Governors University seeks a Principal Software Engineer, AI Platform, to architect and build a scalable, secure AI platform. You will enable retrieval, inference, orchestration, tool calls, and multi-application experiences with FERPA-aligned protections.

You’ll lead architecture across teams, define standards, and mentor engineers while delivering observable, cost-aware AI-powered solutions in a Java/Angular on AWS environment. This in-office role is based in Salt Lake City, UT.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field.
• 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 (RAG), tool or function calling, and evaluation of AI system performance.
• Experience designing APIs and integration contracts consumed by internal and external engineering teams within complex enterprise environments.
• Production experience with at least one server-side programming language such as Java, Python, TypeScript/Node.js, C#, or Go.

Responsibilities

• Architect and build a conversational AI platform that supports retrieval over WGU 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

LLM-powered apps

API design

Security & governance

AWS

Java

TypeScript/Node.js

Angular

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science / IT / related field

Tools

Java

Angular

AWS

CI/CD pipelines

TypeScript/Node.js

Job description

Western Governors University seeks a Principal Software Engineer, AI Platform, to architect and build a scalable, secure AI platform. You will enable retrieval, inference, orchestration, tool calls, and multi-application experiences with FERPA-aligned protections.

You’ll lead architecture across teams, define standards, and mentor engineers while delivering observable, cost-aware AI-powered solutions in a Java/Angular on AWS environment. This in-office role is based in Salt Lake City, UT.