Staff Software Engineer, AI

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

Benefits offered by this job

Bonuses

Medical, dental, vision coverage

Tuition benefits

Flexible paid time off

Retirement plan

Wellbeing program

Reimbursement of travel

Job summary

Western Governors University seeks a Staff Software Engineer, AI, to lead the creation of an AI assistant for the student portal. You will design production foundations, enable retrieval, inference, and secure multi-tenant access while hands-on coding across the stack.

You’ll mentor engineers, shape technical direction, and ensure compliance with FERPA, security, and governance standards in a high-impact education technology platform.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field.
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production web applications and web services.
• 2+ years of hands-on experience building LLM-backed applications in production, including retrieval-augmented generation and evaluation of output quality.
• Full-stack production experience with a server-side language (Java, Python, TypeScript/Node, C#, or Go) and a modern front-end framework (Angular, React, Vue).
• Experience integrating with databases and with third-party or enterprise systems.

Responsibilities

• Design and build the chat foundation for the student portal assistant, including retrieval, inference integration, state, and service layer.
• Own the assistant’s security and privacy model, ensuring FERPA-compliant retrieval and generation.
• Build guardrails, governance, audit logging, and explainability controls.
• Establish evaluation, regression testing, and observability for AI outputs.
• Design, build, test, and operate full-stack portal features within Java/Angular environment.
• Integrate with systems of record, identity providers, and internal services; participate in production support.

Skills

LLM apps

Full-stack development

Backend languages

Frontend frameworks

Security by design

Technical leadership

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS or related field

Tools

AWS Bedrock

SageMaker

CI/CD tooling

Cloud infrastructure

Job description

If you’re passionate about building a better future for individuals, communities, and our country—and you’re committed to working hard to play your part in building that future—consider WGU as the next step in your career.

Driven by a mission to expand access to higher education through online, competency-based degree programs, WGU is also committed to being a great place to work for a diverse workforce of student-focused professionals. The university has pioneered a new way to learn in the 21st century, one that has received praise from academic, industry, government, and media leaders. Whatever your role, working for WGU gives you a part to play in helping students graduate, creating a better tomorrow for themselves and their families.

The salary range for this position takes into account the wide range of factors that are considered in making compensation decisions including but not limited to skill sets; experience and training; licensure and certifications; and other business and organizational needs.

At WGU, it is not typical for an individual to be hired at or near the top of the range for their position, and compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case. A reasonable estimate of the current range is:

Grade: Technical 411

Pay Range: $161,000.00 - $249,500.00

Job Description

WGU’s Student Experience team builds the student portal that working adults use to navigate their education, monitor progress, connect with mentors, and determine what comes next. The team is now developing an AI assistant integrated into the portal and grounded in WGU’s systems to answer students’ questions about their individual degree journeys.

As a Staff Software Engineer, AI, you will be the technical center of this work. You will design and build the assistant’s production foundation, including retrieval, inference, guardrails, evaluation, observability, and a security model that isolates each student’s information. This is a hands‑on product engineering role for someone who wants to set technical direction while continuing to design, code, test, and operate software.

You will help simplify WGU’s complex technology landscape from the student’s perspective while contributing to an ambitious effort to apply AI meaningfully within higher education. You will join a culture that encourages engineers to operate as inventors, frame undefined problems, and build solutions beyond the boundaries of individual backlog items.

What You’ll Do

• Design and build the chat foundation for the student portal assistant, including retrieval over WGU content and data, inference integration, conversation state, and the supporting service layer.


• Own the assistant’s security and privacy model, building authorization‑aware retrieval and generation that protect student information and meet FERPA obligations.


• Build guardrails and governance capabilities, including input and output filtering, refusal and escalation paths, prompt-injection resistance, audit logging, and explainability controls.


• Establish evaluation, regression testing, and observability practices that measure groundedness, accuracy, quality, latency, and cost for nondeterministic AI outputs.


• Design, build, test, and operate full‑stack portal features across services, APIs, data access, and user interfaces within an established Java and Angular environment.


• Integrate the assistant with systems of record, identity providers, and internal services, and participate in production support and service restoration.


• Mentor engineers through technical design, code review, and pairing while documenting decisions and modeling strong AI‑assisted development practices.

What You’ll Bring

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field.


• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production web applications and web services.


• Demonstrated technical ownership beyond individual feature delivery, including leading the design and build of a significant system or initiative and influencing technical decisions beyond your immediate work.


• 2+ years of hands‑on experience building LLM‑backed applications in production, including retrieval‑augmented generation, inference integration, and evaluation of output quality.


• Full‑stack production experience with a server‑side language such as Java, Python, TypeScript/Node, C#, or Go, and a modern front‑end framework such as Angular, React, or Vue.


• Experience integrating with databases and with third‑party or enterprise systems in an existing infrastructure.


• The ability to design for security, privacy, scale, reliability, and cost while communicating technical decisions effectively to engineering, security, governance, and business partners. Equivalent relevant experience performing the essential functions of this job may substitute for education degree requirements. Generally, equivalent relevant experience is defined as one year of experience for one year of education and is at the discretion of the hiring manager.

Bonus Points

• Production experience with AWS Bedrock, Amazon SageMaker, or comparable managed model platforms, along with AWS, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, or cloud‑native delivery.


• Experience with authorization‑aware retrieval, multi‑tenant data isolation, vector databases, hybrid search, LLM evaluation and observability, red‑teaming, or prompt‑injection testing.


• Experience with Angular, identity and access management, regulated data environments such as FERPA or HIPAA, established codebase modernization, or higher education technology.

What to Expect

At WGU, our mission drives everything we do, including how we hire. Our interview experience is designed to give qualified candidates the opportunity to show their best work through meaningful conversations and collaboration.

We thoughtfully review every application and invite forward the candidates whose experience and potential best align with the role and our mission.

Work Location

This is a full‑time, in‑office position requiring five days per week in our Salt Lake City, Utah office, designed to foster the collaboration and connection that fuel our best work.

Travel Requirement

This position requires occasional travel of up to 20%, including required attendance at designated company summits (typically one to two per year). Additional travel may include conferences, visits to company locations, and other business‑related events as needed. Additional travel may be assigned as needed to support business requirements.

Position & Application Details

Full‑Time Regular Positions (classified as regular and working 40 standard weekly hours): This is a full‑time, regular position (classified for 40 standard weekly hours) that is eligible for bonuses; medical, dental, vision, telehealth and mental healthcare; health savings account and flexible spending account; basic and voluntary life insurance; disability coverage; accident, critical illness and hospital indemnity supplemental coverages; legal and identity theft coverage; retirement savings plan; wellbeing program; discounted WGU tuition; and flexible paid time off for rest and relaxation with no need for accrual, flexible paid sick time with no need for accrual, 11 paid holidays, and other paid leaves, including up to 12 weeks of parental leave.

Additional Information

Disclaimer: The job posting highlights the most critical responsibilities and requirements of the job. It’s not all‑inclusive.

Accommodations: Applicants with disabilities who require assistance or accommodation during the application or interview process should contact our Talent Acquisition team at [e-mail].

Equal Employment Opportunity: All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to any protected characteristic as required by law.