Job DescriptionWGU's Student Experience team builds the student portal that working adults use to navigate their education, monitor progress, connect with mentors, and determine what comes next. The team is now developing an AI assistant integrated into the portal and grounded in WGU's systems to answer students' questions about their individual degree journeys.
As a Staff Software Engineer, AI, you will be the technical center of this work. You will design and build the assistant's production foundation, including retrieval, inference, guardrails, evaluation, observability, and a security model that isolates each student's information. This is a hands-on product engineering role for someone who wants to set technical direction while continuing to design, code, test, and operate software.
You will help simplify WGU's complex technology landscape from the student's perspective while contributing to an ambitious effort to apply AI meaningfully within higher education. You will join a culture that encourages engineers to operate as inventors, frame undefined problems, and build solutions beyond the boundaries of individual backlog items.
What You'll Do- Design and build the chat foundation for the student portal assistant, including retrieval over WGU content and data, inference integration, conversation state, and the supporting service layer.
- Own the assistant's security and privacy model, building authorization-aware retrieval and generation that protect student information and meet FERPA obligations.
- Build guardrails and governance capabilities, including input and output filtering, refusal and escalation paths, prompt-injection resistance, audit logging, and explainability controls.
- Establish evaluation, regression testing, and observability practices that measure groundedness, accuracy, quality, latency, and cost for nondeterministic AI outputs.
- Design, build, test, and operate full-stack portal features across services, APIs, data access, and user interfaces within an established Java and Angular environment.
- 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 decisions and modeling strong AI-assisted development practices.
What You'll Bring- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field.
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production web applications and web services.
- Demonstrated technical ownership beyond individual feature delivery, including leading the design and build of a significant system or initiative and influencing technical decisions beyond your immediate work.
- 2+ years of hands-on experience building LLM-backed applications in production, including retrieval-augmented generation, inference integration, and evaluation of output quality.
- 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 with databases and with third-party or enterprise systems in an existing infrastructure.
- The ability to design for security, privacy, scale, reliability, and cost while communicating technical decisions effectively to engineering, security, governance, and business partners. Equivalent relevant experience performing the essential functions of this job may substitute for education degree requirements. Generally, equivalent relevant experience is defined as one year of experience for one year of education and is at the discretion of the hiring manager.
Bonus Points- Production experience with AWS Bedrock, Amazon SageMaker, or comparable managed model platforms, along with AWS, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, or cloud-native delivery.
- Experience with authorization-aware retrieval, multi-tenant data isolation, vector databases, hybrid search, LLM evaluation and observability, red-teaming, or prompt-injection testing.
- Experience with Angular, identity and access management, regulated data environments such as FERPA or HIPAA, established codebase modernization, or higher education technology.
What to ExpectAt WGU, our mission drives everything we do, including how we hire. Our interview experience is designed to give qualified candidates the opportunity to show their best work through meaningful conversations and collaboration.
We thoughtfully review every application and invite forward the candidates whose experience and potential best align with the role and our mission.
Work LocationThis is a full-time, in-office position requiring five days per week in our Salt Lake City, Utah office, designed to foster the collaboration and connection that fuel our best work.
Travel RequirementThis position requires occasional travel of up to 20%, including required attendance at designated company summits (typically one to two per year). Additional travel may include conferences, visits to company locations, and other business-related events as needed. Additional travel may be assigned as needed to support business requirements.
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Position & Application DetailsFull-Time Regular Positions (classified as regular and working 40 standard weekly hours): This is a full-time, regular position (classified for 40 standard weekly hours) that is eligible for bonuses; medical, dental, vision, telehealth and mental healthcare; health savings account and flexible spending account; basic and voluntary life insurance; disability coverage; accident, critical illness and hospital indemnity supplemental coverages; legal and identity theft coverage; retirement savings plan; wellbeing program; discounted WGU tuition; and flexible paid time off for rest and relaxation with no need for accrual, flexible paid sick time with no need for accrual, 11 paid holidays, and other paid leaves, including up to 12 weeks of parental leave.
How to Apply: If interested, an application will need to be submitted online. Internal WGU employees will need to apply through the internal job board in Workday.
