Principal Software Engineer-Student LifeCycle Services

Western Governors University•Salt Lake, UT

1d•Remote

About The Position

The Principal Software Engineer is a position of technical expertise, influence, and leadership in the technology realm. The position will be required to apply their expert knowledge to ensure best practices and well-engineered architecture across the University. They will also be a key stakeholder and initiator of major changes to processes, engineering practices, and system administration. This position will be required to work in a space of solving critical issues and initiatives across multiple departments. It will require an extensive and deep understanding of cutting-edge practices and innovative approaches to problems. Principal Software Engineers are also tasked with establishing and maintaining a positive and productive culture based on the WGU Leadership Principles. Shape the Future of Education Through Technology At WGU, technology is at the heart of transforming higher education. As a Principal Software Engineer, you will serve as one of the organization's foremost technical leaders, influencing the architecture, scalability, reliability, and future direction of a platform that empowers hundreds of thousands of students on their educational journey. This is not a role focused on day-to-day feature delivery. It is an opportunity to solve complex, organization-wide engineering challenges, define technical strategy across multiple product and engineering domains, and elevate the capabilities of an entire engineering organization. You will partner with senior engineering leaders, product executives, and business stakeholders to drive innovation, establish architectural direction, and create technology solutions that scale for the future. If you are passionate about distributed systems, modern cloud architecture, technical leadership, engineering excellence, and mentoring the next generation of technical talent, we'd love to meet you.

Requirements

Deep Technical Expertise: You bring extensive experience designing and building large-scale software systems and have a proven track record of delivering architecture that balances scalability, resilience, security, and business value.
Expertise in: Distributed systems and cloud-native architectures
Modern SaaS platforms
Microservices and event-driven systems
API design and system integration
Security, fault tolerance, and high-availability architectures
Software design patterns and architectural principles
Performance optimization and observability
Modern software development practices and DevOps principles
Strategic Thinker: You see beyond individual projects and understand how technology decisions impact the broader organization. You are skilled at connecting technical strategy to business outcomes and influencing decisions across multiple stakeholders.
Technical Leader: You lead through expertise, vision, mentorship, and influence. You build trust across teams and help engineers at every level grow their technical capabilities and decision-making skills.
Customer and Student Focused: You understand that great technology exists to solve real problems. You are passionate about creating exceptional experiences for students, faculty, and staff, and you consistently advocate for solutions that deliver meaningful value.

Nice To Haves

Mentoring the next generation of technical talent

Responsibilities

Lead Architecture Across the Enterprise: Define and evolve architecture strategies that span multiple engineering teams, products, and technology domains.
Drive the design of scalable, resilient, secure, and maintainable systems that support WGU's mission-critical education platform.
Identify opportunities to simplify and modernize existing systems while reducing operational complexity and technical debt.
Establish architectural standards, design patterns, and engineering best practices that improve consistency and quality across the organization.
Influence Technology Strategy: Serve as a trusted technical advisor to engineering leadership, product management, and executive stakeholders.
Translate business objectives into long-term technical strategies and architectural roadmaps.
Evaluate emerging technologies, frameworks, and industry trends to identify innovations that create meaningful value for WGU and its students.
Lead critical technical decision-making for initiatives with enterprise-wide impact.
Drive Engineering Excellence: Champion software craftsmanship, maintainability, security, observability, reliability, and performance across engineering teams.
Influence engineering practices around code quality, testing strategies, system design reviews, and operational readiness.
Guide teams in balancing speed, quality, scalability, and long-term sustainability.
Use data, metrics, and system insights to improve platform health and operational performance.
Mentor and Develop Technical Talent: Coach and mentor Staff Engineers, Senior Engineers, and emerging technical leaders.
Foster a culture of continuous learning, technical curiosity, and engineering excellence.
Lead architecture reviews and design discussions that help elevate engineering capabilities across the organization.
Multiply organizational impact through influence rather than authority.
Solve the Most Challenging Problems: Identify systemic challenges that cross organizational boundaries and drive solutions from concept through execution.
Anticipate future scaling needs, architectural risks, and platform constraints before they become business problems.
Lead complex initiatives requiring coordination across multiple teams, technologies, and business functions.
Serve as a technical escalation point for the organization's most critical engineering challenges.
Serve as a Principal-level technical authority across multiple engineering domains.
Define and lead enterprise architecture initiatives.
Drive platform quality, reliability, scalability, and operational excellence.
Identify and address cross-functional technical challenges and dependencies.
Guide long-term technology strategy and architectural roadmaps.
Partner with product and business leaders to align technology investments with organizational goals.
Mentor engineers and technical leaders throughout the organization.
Champion innovation and adoption of modern engineering practices.
Improve platform availability, performance, and user experience through data-driven decision making.
Lead technical risk assessment, mitigation planning, and strategic solution design.