Western Governors University
Staff Software Engineer, AI
Salt Lake City, UT · Staff+ · Full-time
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About the role
- As a Staff Software Engineer, AI, you will be the technical center of this work.
- 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.
Responsibilities
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Requirements
- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field.
- 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.
- Production experience with AWS Bedrock, Amazon SageMaker, or comparable managed model platforms, along with AWS, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, or cloud-native delivery.
- 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.
- Experience with authorization-aware retrieval, multi-tenant data isolation, vector databases, hybrid search, LLM evaluation and observability, red-teaming, or prompt-injection testing.
Compensation
- $161,000.00 - $249,500.00
Benefits
- 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.
- 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.
- Experience with Angular, identity and access management, regulated data environments such as FERPA or HIPAA, established codebase modernization, or higher education technology.
Company info
- We thoughtfully review every application and invite forward the candidates whose experience and potential best align with the role and our mission.
Equal opportunity
- All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to any protected characteristic as required by law.
- Accommodations: Applicants with disabilities who require assistance or accommodation during the application or interview process should contact our Talent Acquisition team at recruiting@wgu.edu.
This listing is sourced directly from Western Governors University's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.