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