# Staff Software Engineer, AI

**Company**: WGU
**Location**: Salt Lake City, UT
**Work arrangement**: onsite
**Experience**: staff
**Job type**: full-time
**Salary**: $161,000.00 - $249,500.00
**Category**: Engineering
**Industry**: Education

**Apply**: https://wgu.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/External/job/Salt-Lake-City-UT/Staff-Software-Engineer--AI_JR-026231?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_a7f09a51-6df

## Description

WGU'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.

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.

**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 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.

**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
- Python
- TypeScript/Node
- C#
- Go
- React
- Vue
- LLM-backed applications
- retrieval-augmented generation
- inference integration
- evaluation of output quality

### Nice to have
- AWS Bedrock
- Amazon SageMaker
- authorization-aware retrieval
- multi-tenant data isolation
- vector databases
- hybrid search
- LLM evaluation and observability
- red-teaming
- prompt-injection testing

---

Source: [Apply at wgu.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com](https://wgu.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/External/job/Salt-Lake-City-UT/Staff-Software-Engineer--AI_JR-026231?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply)