Staff Software Engineer, AI

Western Governors University is building an AI assistant integrated into the student portal, with a focus on trust, safety, and production readiness. This full-time Staff Software Engineer role in Salt Lake City, UT (onsite) helps establish the foundation for retrieval, inference, guardrails, evaluation, observability, and a security model designed to isolate each student’s information and support FERPA obligations.

What you’ll build

You will design and deliver the chat foundation for the student portal assistant. The work includes retrieval over WGU content and data, inference integration, conversation state, and the service layer that supports reliable, production-grade assistant behavior.

Responsibilities

• Design and build the assistant’s foundation across retrieval, inference integration, conversation state, and supporting service layers.
• Own the security and privacy model, implementing authorization-aware retrieval and generation to 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 and regression testing plus observability practices for nondeterministic AI outputs, measuring groundedness, accuracy, quality, latency, and cost.
• 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, and pairing while 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.
• Demonstrated technical ownership beyond individual feature delivery, including leading design and build of a significant system or initiative and influencing technical decisions beyond immediate work.
• 2+ years of hands-on experience building LLM-backed applications in production, 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 with databases and with third-party or enterprise systems in an existing infrastructure.
• Ability to design for security, privacy, scale, reliability, and cost while communicating technical decisions effectively 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

Bonus points

• Production experience with AWS Bedrock, Amazon SageMaker, or comparable managed model platforms, plus 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, travel, and schedule

• Work location: Full-time in-office role requiring five days per week in the Salt Lake City, Utah office.
• Travel: Occasional travel up to 20%, including required attendance at designated company summits (typically one to two per year), with additional travel as needed.
• Position: Full-Time Regular (classified as regular and working 40 standard weekly hours).

Compensation

USD 161,000 - 249,500 per yearly.

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

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].