Staff Software Engineer, AI
Western Governors University4 days ago
Salt Lake City, UT, USAStaff+
Base Salary
$161k - $250k/yr
Responsibilities
- Design and build the student portal assistant’s chat foundation, including retrieval, inference integration, conversation state, and supporting services.
- Own the assistant’s security and privacy model, including authorization-aware retrieval and generation that protects student information and supports FERPA obligations.
- Build AI guardrails and governance capabilities such as input and output filtering, refusal and escalation paths, prompt-injection resistance, audit logging, and explainability controls.
- Establish evaluation, regression testing, and observability practices for groundedness, accuracy, quality, latency, cost, and other nondeterministic AI outputs.
- Design, build, test, and operate full-stack portal features across services, APIs, data access, and user interfaces.
- Integrate the assistant with systems of record, identity providers, and internal services while participating in production support and service restoration.
- Mentor engineers through technical design, code review, and pairing, and document technical decisions and AI-assisted development practices.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field, or equivalent relevant experience that may substitute for the degree requirement.
- At least 8 years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production web applications and web services.
- At least 2 years of hands-on experience building production LLM-backed applications, including retrieval-augmented generation, inference integration, and output-quality evaluation.
- Demonstrated technical ownership of significant systems or initiatives and influence over technical decisions beyond individual feature delivery.
- 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 and third-party or enterprise systems in an existing infrastructure.
- Ability to design for security, privacy, scale, reliability, and cost while communicating technical decisions to engineering, security, governance, and business partners.
- Preferred experience includes AWS Bedrock, Amazon SageMaker, managed model platforms, AWS, infrastructure as code, cloud-native delivery, authorization-aware retrieval, multi-tenant data isolation, vector databases, hybrid search, LLM evaluation and observability, red-teaming, prompt-injection testing, Angular, identity and access management, regulated data environments, codebase modernization, or higher education technology.
Benefits
- Full-time regular position with eligibility for bonuses and medical, dental, vision, telehealth, and mental healthcare benefits.
- Health savings account, flexible spending account, life insurance, disability coverage, supplemental accident, critical illness, and hospital indemnity coverage.
- Legal and identity theft coverage, retirement savings plan, wellbeing program, and discounted WGU tuition.
- Flexible paid time off, flexible paid sick time, 11 paid holidays, and other paid leaves including up to 12 weeks of parental leave.
- Five days per week in-office in Salt Lake City, Utah, with occasional travel of up to 20% for summits, conferences, company locations, and other business events.
Categories
About Western Governors University
Western Governors University is a nonprofit, accredited online university offering competency-based bachelor’s and master’s degree programs for working adults in business, IT, teaching, and healthcare. It operates a tuition-based model with flat-rate terms that let students advance as they demonstrate proficiency. Founded in 1997 by 19 U.S. governors and based in the Salt Lake City, Utah area, WGU serves students nationwide through fully remote instruction and support.