Staff AI Engineer - Secure, Production-Ready LLM Portal

WGU; Salt Lake City (UT); On-site; USD 161,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Bonuses

Medical, dental, vision

Flexible paid time off

Tuition assistance

Parental leave up to 12 weeks

Job summary

WGU is hiring a Staff Software Engineer, AI, to lead the creation of an AI-powered student-portal assistant. You will design the production foundation, including retrieval, inference, guardrails, evaluation, observability, and a security model that isolates each student’s information.

This hands-on role shapes technical direction and builds end-to-end software. You will mentor engineers, work across services and data layers, and ensure secure, scalable delivery in a Java/Angular stack with

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field.
• 8+ years of professional software engineering with production web apps and services.
• 2+ years building LLM-backed apps including retrieval-augmented generation and evaluation.
• Equivalents may substitute for education requirements.

Responsibilities

• Design and build the chat foundation for the student portal assistant, including retrieval over WGU content and data.
• Own the assistant's security and privacy model, building authorization-aware retrieval and generation that protect student information and FERPA obligations.
• Build guardrails and governance capabilities, including input/output filtering, escalation paths, prompt-injection resistance, audit logging, and explainability controls.
• Establish evaluation, regression testing, and observability practices to measure groundedness, accuracy, quality, latency, and cost for nondeterministic AI outputs.
• Design, build, test, and operate full-stack portal features across services, data access, and UI within Java and Angular environment.
• Integrate the assistant with systems of record, identity providers, and internal services; participate in production support and service restoration.
• Mentor engineers through design, code review, and pairing while documenting decisions and modeling AI-assisted development practices.

Skills

LLM-backed apps

Full-stack development

Java / Python / TS

Angular / React / Vue

Security & privacy design

CI/CD & AWS

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/IT or related

Tools

AWS Bedrock

SageMaker

CI/CD pipelines

Job description

WGU is hiring a Staff Software Engineer, AI, to lead the creation of an AI-powered student-portal assistant. You will design the production foundation, including retrieval, inference, guardrails, evaluation, observability, and a security model that isolates each student’s information.

This hands-on role shapes technical direction and builds end-to-end software. You will mentor engineers, work across services and data layers, and ensure secure, scalable delivery in a Java/Angular stack with