Staff Software Engineer, AI

Western Governors University is seeking a Staff Software Engineer, AI to help design and deliver the production foundation for an AI assistant embedded in the student portal. The work spans retrieval, inference, guardrails, evaluation, observability, and a security approach that keeps each student’s information isolated.

Role Overview

You will build the chat foundation that powers the assistant inside the portal, including retrieval across WGU content and data, integration with inference, conversation state, and the service layer that supports the experience. A central focus is ensuring authorization-aware access to student information and meeting FERPA obligations.

Responsibilities

• Design and build the student portal assistant foundation, including retrieval over WGU content and data, inference integration, conversation state, and the supporting service layer.
• Own the assistant’s security and privacy model, implementing authorization-aware retrieval and generation to protect student information and support FERPA compliance.
• Build guardrails and governance capabilities: input and output filtering, refusal and escalation paths, prompt-injection resistance, audit logging, and explainability controls.
• Create 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 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, pairing, and by documenting decisions and modeling strong AI-assisted development practices.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field.
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production web applications and web services.
• Proven technical ownership beyond individual feature delivery, including leading the design and build of a significant system or initiative and influencing technical decisions outside your immediate work.
• 2+ years of hands-on production experience building LLM-backed applications, including retrieval-augmented generation, inference integration, and evaluating output quality.
• Full-stack production experience with a server-side language such as Java, Python, TypeScript/Node, C#, or Go, plus a modern front-end framework such as Angular, React, or Vue.
• Experience integrating with databases and third-party or enterprise systems within an existing infrastructure.
• Ability to design for security, privacy, scale, reliability, and cost, and communicate technical decisions to engineering, security, governance, and business partners. Equivalent relevant experience may substitute for education requirements.

Technologies

• Java, Angular, Python, TypeScript, Node, C#, Go, React, Vue

Benefits

• Eligible for bonuses
• Medical, dental, vision, telehealth and mental healthcare
• Health savings account and flexible spending account
• Basic and voluntary life insurance
• 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 with no need for accrual
• Flexible paid sick time with no need for accrual
• 11 paid holidays
• Other paid leaves, including up to 12 weeks of parental leave

Bonus Points

• Production experience with AWS Bedrock, Amazon SageMaker, or comparable managed model platforms, along with AWS, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, or cloud-native delivery.
• Experience with authorization-aware retrieval, multi-tenant data isolation, vector databases, hybrid search, 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.

Location, Schedule, and Travel

• Salt Lake City, UT (onsite)
• Full-time, in-office position requiring five days per week
• Occasional travel up to 20%, including required attendance at designated company summits (typically one to two per year)
• Full-Time Regular Positions, working 40 standard weekly hours

Compensation

• USD 161,000 - 249,500 per yearly

How to Apply

• Submit an application online.
• Internal WGU employees apply through the internal job board in Workday.

Accommodations

Applicants with disabilities who require assistance or accommodation during the application or interview process should contact [email protected].