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