Principal Software Engineer - AI Platform

Western Governors University•Salt Lake, UT

9d•Onsite

About The Position

WGU’s Student Experience team builds digital experiences for working adults balancing education, careers, and family responsibilities. The team is creating a conversational AI platform that enables students, staff, and applications to accomplish meaningful 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 retrieval, inference, orchestration, guardrails, evaluation, security, and API capabilities. This hands-on product engineering role will establish technical foundations, standards, and platform capabilities for teams across WGU to build trusted AI-powered experiences. The role designs, builds, tests, operates, and modernizes production services, APIs, integrations, and interfaces in a Java and Angular environment on AWS. This is a full-time, regular, in-office position requiring five days per week at WGU’s Salt Lake City, Utah office. Occasional travel of up to 20% is required, including designated company summits, generally one to two per year, and potentially conferences and visits to company locations. The position is classified as 40 standard weekly hours and is eligible for bonuses and the benefits described in the posting.

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.
12 or more 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 that measure groundedness, quality, latency, reliability, and cost across AI-powered systems.
Define MCP servers, tool contracts, APIs, templates, libraries, and reference implementations that enable engineering teams to 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.