# Principal Software Engineer, AI Platform

**Company**: Western Governors University (WGU)
**Location**: Salt Lake City, UT
**Work arrangement**: onsite
**Experience**: senior
**Job type**: full-time
**Salary**: $180,300.00 - $279,500.00
**Category**: Engineering
**Industry**: Education

**Apply**: https://wgu.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/External/job/Salt-Lake-City-UT/Principal-Software-Engineer---AI-Platform_JR-026474-1?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_557b50e3-704

## Description

WGU's Student Experience team builds digital experiences that help working adults balance education, careers, and family responsibilities. As Principal Software Engineer, AI Platform, you will architect and build a conversational AI 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.

**Responsibilities:**

- 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.

**Requirements:**

- 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.

**Benefits:**

- 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

- 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

- Other paid leaves, including up to 12 weeks of parental leave

## Skills

### Required
- Java
- Angular
- AWS
- AI
- LLM
- FERPA

### Nice to have
- MCP servers
- agent orchestration frameworks
- AWS Bedrock
- Amazon SageMaker
- evaluation platforms
- LLM observability solutions
- AI safety testing capabilities

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Source: [Apply at wgu.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com](https://wgu.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/External/job/Salt-Lake-City-UT/Principal-Software-Engineer---AI-Platform_JR-026474-1?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply)