Principal Software Engineer
Western Governors University2 hours ago
Salt Lake City, UT, USAStaff+
Base Salary
$180k - $280k/yr
Responsibilities
- Partner with engineering and product leadership to define technical strategy and delivery roadmaps that improve the student experience at scale.
- Build and ship production-grade software while establishing engineering standards and repeatable delivery practices.
- Lead Agile delivery practices that balance planning, rapid execution, and predictable outcomes.
- Design and evolve cloud-native architectures emphasizing scalability, observability, reliability, security, and operational supportability.
- Evaluate technical decisions through build, buy, borrow, or bot considerations focused on speed-to-value, sustainability, and fiscal responsibility.
- Mentor engineers on modern software engineering practices, AI-assisted development workflows, and emerging technologies.
- Prototype new tools, frameworks, and architectural patterns through proof-of-value initiatives.
- Drive engineering excellence across multiple teams and identify practical, data-grounded solutions for architectural inefficiencies and technical debt.
- Partner with infrastructure, cloud, security, architecture, and product teams as a peer technical leader.
- Communicate technical strategy, dependencies, tradeoffs, and risks to executive leadership.
- Support operational readiness, incident response, day-2 supportability, and high-impact operational events across enterprise systems.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent relevant experience may substitute at the hiring manager’s discretion.
- 12+ years of progressive software engineering experience, including architecture, delivery leadership, and technical mentorship across multiple teams.
- Experience building and operating enterprise web applications using Java, SQL, and Git.
- Experience designing and delivering integrations with third-party and internal platforms.
- A track record in large-scale enterprise IT organizations with established operational processes.
- Preferred: master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.
- Preferred: Kafka/Confluent, integration middleware such as Apache Camel or MuleSoft, AWS, Spring Boot, Kubernetes, and container orchestration experience.
- Preferred: experience with ECS/EKS, Lambda, SNS/SQS, API Gateway, Terraform, Dynatrace, Datadog, custom metrics, and SLO management.
- Preferred: familiarity with AI/ML platforms, LLM integration, and agentic frameworks.
- Preferred: higher education, EdTech, or regulated-industry experience; experience across multiple industry verticals; and ITIL v4 Foundation, AWS Solutions Architect, or CKA certification.
Benefits
- Full-time regular position classified at 40 standard weekly hours and eligible 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, wellbeing program, and discounted WGU tuition.
- Flexible paid time off and paid sick time without accrual, 11 paid holidays, and other paid leaves including up to 12 weeks of parental leave.
- Occasional travel of up to 20%, including designated company summits typically one to two times per year.