Principal Software Engineer - AI Platform
About The Position
WGU’s Student Experience team builds digital experiences that help working adults balance education, careers, and family responsibilities. The team is creating a conversational AI platform that enables students, staff, and applications to accomplish work through secure, intelligent experiences grounded in WGU systems and data. The Principal Software Engineer, AI Platform will architect and build this platform from the ground up, shaping its retrieval, inference, orchestration, guardrails, evaluation, security, and API capabilities. This hands-on product engineering role focuses on delivering scalable, secure, and observable AI solutions and establishing technical foundations, standards, and capabilities for other engineering teams. The position is full-time and in-office five days per week at WGU’s Salt Lake City, Utah office. It requires occasional travel of up to 20%, including attendance at designated company summits, typically one to two per year, and other business-related travel as needed.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field; equivalent relevant experience may substitute for the degree at the hiring manager’s discretion.
- At least 12 years of professional software engineering experience designing, building, and operating production web applications and services.
- Demonstrated experience owning architecture across multiple teams or systems and defining platforms, shared services, or standards used by other engineering teams.
- At least 2 years of hands-on experience building and deploying LLM-powered applications in production, 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 in complex enterprise environments.
- Production experience with at least one server-side programming language, such as Java, Python, TypeScript/Node.js, C#, or Go.
- Ability to influence and partner across engineering, architecture, security, governance, and business stakeholders while remaining a hands-on technical contributor.
Nice To Haves
- Experience building MCP servers or clients, agent orchestration frameworks, AWS Bedrock, Amazon SageMaker, evaluation platforms, LLM observability solutions, or AI safety testing capabilities.
- Experience designing authorization-aware retrieval systems, multi-tenant data isolation, identity and access management solutions, SSO, OIDC, SAML, or systems handling FERPA, HIPAA, or similarly regulated data.
- Experience with Java, Angular, AWS, infrastructure as code, CI/CD pipelines, application modernization initiatives, conversational interfaces, higher education technology, student information systems, or online learning platforms.
Responsibilities
- Architect and build a conversational AI platform supporting 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 protect student data in alignment 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 to measure groundedness, quality, latency, reliability, and cost across AI-powered systems.
- Define MCP servers, tool contracts, APIs, templates, libraries, and reference implementations that help engineering teams 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.
- Participate in occasional business travel, including designated company summits.
Benefits
- Eligible for bonuses.
- Medical, dental, vision, telehealth, and mental healthcare coverage.
- Health savings account and flexible spending account.
- Basic and voluntary life insurance.
- Disability coverage.
- Accident, critical illness, and hospital indemnity supplemental coverage.
- Legal and identity theft coverage.
- Retirement savings plan.
- Wellbeing program.
- Discounted WGU tuition.
- Flexible paid time off with no accrual requirement.
- Flexible paid sick time with no accrual requirement.
- 11 paid holidays.
- Other paid leaves, including up to 12 weeks of parental leave.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Principal
