Principal Software Engineer-Student LifeCycle Services
Western Governors University1 day ago
Salt Lake City, UT, USAStaff+
Base Salary
$180k - $280k/yr
Responsibilities
- Define and lead enterprise architecture initiatives across multiple engineering teams, products, and technology domains.
- Drive scalable, resilient, secure, maintainable, and highly available system architecture for WGU’s education platform.
- Translate business objectives into long-term technical strategies, architectural roadmaps, and enterprise-wide technical decisions.
- Identify and solve systemic technical challenges, architectural risks, dependencies, and technical debt across organizational boundaries.
- Champion software craftsmanship, code quality, testing strategies, observability, reliability, performance, and operational readiness.
- Serve as a technical advisor and escalation point for engineering leaders, product executives, and business stakeholders.
- Mentor Staff Engineers, Senior Engineers, and emerging technical leaders through coaching, architecture reviews, and design discussions.
- Evaluate emerging technologies and engineering practices and lead their adoption where they create meaningful value.
- Use data, metrics, and system insights to improve platform health, availability, performance, and user experience.
Requirements
- Extensive experience designing and building large-scale software systems and delivering architecture balancing scalability, resilience, security, and business value.
- Expertise in distributed systems, cloud-native architectures, modern SaaS platforms, microservices, event-driven systems, API design, system integration, security, fault tolerance, high availability, software design patterns, performance optimization, observability, and modern software development practices.
- Ability to connect technical strategy to business outcomes and influence decisions across multiple stakeholders and engineering domains.
- Demonstrated technical leadership through expertise, vision, mentorship, and influence rather than formal authority.
- Experience leading complex initiatives involving multiple teams, technologies, and business functions.
- Strong customer and student focus, with the ability to create technology solutions that deliver meaningful value to students, faculty, and staff.
Benefits
- Full-time regular position with a standard 40-hour workweek and eligibility for bonuses.
- Medical, dental, vision, telehealth, mental healthcare, health savings account, and flexible spending account benefits.
- Basic and voluntary life insurance, disability coverage, accident, critical illness, hospital indemnity, legal, and identity theft coverage.
- Retirement savings plan and wellbeing program.
- Discounted WGU tuition.
- Flexible paid time off and paid sick time without accrual requirements, 11 paid holidays, and other paid leaves including up to 12 weeks of parental leave.
- Occasional travel of up to 20%, including one or two required company summits per year and possible conferences or 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.