Staff Software Engineer, AI
About The Position
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 developing an AI assistant integrated into the portal and grounded in WGU’s systems to answer questions about individual student degree journeys. The Staff Software Engineer, AI will serve as the technical center of this work, designing and building 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 that sets technical direction while continuing to design, code, test, and operate software. The engineer will help simplify WGU’s technology landscape from the student’s perspective and contribute to applying AI within higher education. The role calls for framing undefined problems, inventing solutions, and working beyond the boundaries of individual backlog items. It is a full-time, regular, in-office position in Salt Lake City, Utah, requiring five days per week in the office and occasional travel of up to 20%.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field, or equivalent relevant experience performing the job’s essential functions, subject to the hiring manager’s discretion.
- At least 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 immediate work.
- At least 2 years of hands-on experience building production LLM-backed applications, 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 databases with third-party or enterprise systems in an existing infrastructure.
- Ability to design for security, privacy, scale, reliability, and cost, and to communicate technical decisions effectively to engineering, security, governance, and business partners.
Nice To Haves
- Production experience with AWS Bedrock, Amazon SageMaker, or comparable managed model platforms.
- Experience with AWS, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, or cloud-native delivery.
- Experience with authorization-aware retrieval, multi-tenant data isolation, vector databases, or hybrid search.
- Experience with 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.
Responsibilities
- Design and build the student portal assistant’s chat foundation, including retrieval over WGU content and data, inference integration, conversation state, and supporting services.
- Own the assistant’s security and privacy model, including 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 to 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 in 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; document decisions and model strong AI-assisted development practices.
Benefits
- Eligible for bonuses.
- Medical, dental, vision, telehealth, and mental healthcare coverage.
- Health savings account and flexible spending account.
- Basic and voluntary life insurance and disability coverage.
- Accident, critical illness, and hospital indemnity supplemental coverages.
- Legal and identity theft coverage.
- Retirement savings plan.
- Wellbeing program.
- Discounted WGU tuition.
- Flexible paid time off without accrual.
- Flexible paid sick time without accrual.
- 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
Senior
