Principal Software Engineer - AI Platform
Western Governors University1 day ago
Salt Lake City, UT, USAStaff+
Base Salary
$180k - $280k/yr
Responsibilities
- Architect and build a conversational AI platform supporting retrieval, inference integration, orchestration, tool calling, conversation state management, and multiple application experiences.
- Own the platform’s security and privacy model, including authorization-aware retrieval, generation, and tool execution aligned with FERPA requirements.
- Build guardrails and governance capabilities such as input and output filtering, escalation workflows, prompt injection resistance, audit logging, and explainability controls.
- Establish evaluation and observability frameworks measuring groundedness, quality, latency, reliability, and cost across AI-powered systems.
- Define MCP servers, tool contracts, APIs, templates, libraries, and reference implementations for secure and consistent AI-powered workflows.
- Design, build, test, operate, and modernize production services, APIs, integrations, and interfaces in a Java and Angular environment on AWS.
- Provide architecture guidance, mentoring, documentation, operational excellence, and production support across engineering teams.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field, or equivalent relevant experience in lieu of the degree.
- 12+ years of professional software engineering experience designing, building, and operating production web applications and services.
- At least two years of hands-on experience building and deploying production LLM-powered applications, including RAG, tool or function calling, and AI system evaluation.
- Experience owning architecture across multiple teams or systems and defining platforms, shared services, or standards used by other engineering teams.
- Experience designing APIs and integration contracts for internal and external engineering teams in complex enterprise environments.
- Production experience with at least one server-side language such as Java, Python, TypeScript/Node.js, C#, or Go.
- Ability to influence and partner with engineering, architecture, security, governance, and business stakeholders while remaining hands-on.
- Preferred experience includes MCP servers or clients, agent orchestration frameworks, AWS Bedrock, Amazon SageMaker, evaluation platforms, LLM observability, AI safety testing, authorization-aware retrieval, multi-tenant data isolation, IAM, SSO, OIDC, SAML, FERPA or HIPAA-regulated data, infrastructure as code, CI/CD pipelines, application modernization, conversational interfaces, higher education technology, student information systems, or online learning platforms.
Benefits
- Full-time regular position with eligibility for bonuses and benefits.
- Medical, dental, vision, telehealth, mental healthcare, HSA, FSA, life insurance, disability, accident, critical illness, hospital indemnity, legal, and identity theft coverage.
- Retirement savings plan, wellbeing program, discounted WGU tuition, flexible paid time off, flexible paid sick time, 11 paid holidays, and other paid leave including up to 12 weeks of parental leave.
- Full-time, in-office work five days per week in the Salt Lake City, Utah office.
- Occasional travel of up to 20%, including company summits, conferences, company-location visits, 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.