Staff Software Engineer, AI
Western Governors University1 day 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 guardrails and governance features such as 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, and cost of 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, and participate in production support and service restoration.
- Mentor engineers through technical design, code review, and pairing while documenting 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.
- 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 within 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, 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, identity and access management, regulated data environments, codebase modernization, or higher education technology.
Benefits
- Full-time, regular position with 40 standard weekly hours and bonus eligibility.
- Medical, dental, vision, telehealth, mental healthcare, health savings account, flexible spending account, life insurance, disability coverage, accident coverage, critical illness coverage, hospital indemnity coverage, legal coverage, 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 leaves including up to 12 weeks of parental leave.
- Full-time, in-office work in WGU’s Salt Lake City, Utah office five days per week.
- Occasional travel of up to 20%, including company summits, conferences, and visits to company locations.
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.