Staff Software Engineer, AI

About the role

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.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Requirements

• 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