Principal Software Engineer - AI Platform

If you’re passionate about building a better future for individuals, communities, and our country—and you’re committed to working hard to play your part in building that future—consider WGU as the next step in your career.

Driven by a mission to expand access to higher education through online, competency-based degree programs, WGU is also committed to being a great place to work for a diverse workforce of student-focused professionals. The university has pioneered a new way to learn in the 21st century, one that has received praise from academic, industry, government, and media leaders. Whatever your role, working for WGU gives you a part to play in helping students graduate, creating a better tomorrow for themselves and their families.

The salary range for this position takes into account the wide range of factors that are considered in making compensation decisions including but not limited to skill sets; experience and training; licensure and certifications; and other business and organizational needs.

At WGU, it is not typical for an individual to be hired at or near the top of the range for their position, and compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case. A reasonable estimate of the current range is:

Grade: Technical 412 Pay Range: $180,300.00 - $279,500.00

Job Description

Make an Impact

WGU’s Student Experience team builds the digital experiences that help working adults balance education, careers, and family responsibilities. We are creating a conversational AI platform that empowers students, staff, and applications to accomplish meaningful work through secure, intelligent experiences grounded in WGU systems and data.

As Principal Software Engineer, AI Platform, you will architect and build this platform from the ground up. You will shape retrieval, inference, orchestration, guardrails, evaluation, security, and API capabilities that enable teams across WGU to create trusted AI-powered experiences.

This is a hands-on product engineering role focused on delivering scalable, secure, and observable AI solutions. You will establish the technical foundations, standards, and platform capabilities that other engineering teams will leverage as they build the next generation of AI-driven products.

What You'll Do

• Architect and build a conversational AI platform that supports retrieval over WGU content and data, inference integration, orchestration, tool calling, conversation state management, and multiple application experiences.
• Own the platform’s security and privacy model, ensuring retrieval, generation, and tool execution are authorization-aware and maintain strict student data protections aligned with FERPA requirements.
• Build guardrails and governance capabilities including input and output filtering, escalation workflows, prompt injection resistance, audit logging, and explainability controls.
• Establish evaluation and observability frameworks that measure groundedness, quality, latency, reliability, and cost across AI-powered systems.
• Define MCP servers, tool contracts, APIs, templates, libraries, and reference implementations that enable engineering teams to build AI-powered workflows securely and consistently.
• Design, build, test, operate, and modernize production services, APIs, integrations, and interfaces using modern software engineering practices in a Java and Angular environment on AWS.
• Provide technical leadership through architecture guidance, mentoring, documentation, operational excellence, and production support.

What You'll Bring

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field.
• 12+ years of professional software engineering experience designing, building, and operating production web applications and services.
• Demonstrated experience owning architecture across multiple teams or systems and defining platforms, shared services, or standards used by other engineering teams.
• 2+ years of hands-on experience building and deploying LLM-powered applications in production environments, including retrieval augmented generation (RAG), tool or function calling, and evaluation of AI system performance.
• Experience designing APIs and integration contracts consumed by internal and external engineering teams within complex enterprise environments.
• Production experience with at least one server-side programming language such as Java, Python, TypeScript/Node.js, C#, or Go.
• Proven ability to influence and partner across engineering, architecture, security, governance, and business stakeholders while remaining a hands-on technical contributor.

Experience in lieu of education: 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

• Experience building MCP servers or clients, agent orchestration frameworks, AWS Bedrock, Amazon SageMaker, evaluation platforms, LLM observability solutions, or AI safety testing capabilities.
• Experience designing authorization-aware retrieval systems, multi-tenant data isolation, identity and access management solutions, SSO, OIDC, SAML, or systems handling FERPA, HIPAA, or similarly regulated data.
• Experience with Java, Angular, AWS, infrastructure as code, CI/CD pipelines, application modernization initiatives, conversational interfaces, higher education technology, student information systems, or online learning platforms.

What to Expect

At 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.

• Hiring Manager interview
• Senior Manager, Software Engineering interview
• Senior Solutions Architect interview

Work Location

This 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 Requirement

This 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 Details

Full-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.

Additional Information

Disclaimer: The job posting highlights the most critical responsibilities and requirements of the job. It’s not all-inclusive.

Equal Employment Opportunity: All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to any protected characteristic as required by law.