Description
We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join our team at Western Governors University (WGU). As a Senior Software Engineer, you will be responsible for designing, building, and delivering scalable, high-quality software systems across the full stack. You will work closely with product, design, and engineering teams to solve complex problems, drive technical direction, and improve system performance, reliability, and user experience.
Responsibilities:
- Design, build, and deliver scalable, high-quality software systems across the full stack
- Contribute to modern web applications and services, working across frontend, backend, and APIs to deliver end-to-end solutions
- Partner closely with product, design, and engineering teams to solve complex problems, drive technical direction, and improve system performance, reliability, and user experience
- Own the operational health of student-facing systems, handle student data responsibly (FERPA), mentor engineers, and contribute to a strong engineering culture
- Participate in on-call rotation and act as the escalation point for complex production incidents
- Lead migrations and modernization within the domain (framework/library upgrades, service re-platforming, database changes) and manage the team's technical-debt landscape
- Challenge incomplete, conflicting, or infeasible requirements and drive root-cause analysis rather than fixing symptoms
- Use AI-assisted development tools effectively and responsibly, within data-handling and security policies
- Lead troubleshooting and resolution of production incidents, including on-call response, and drive post-incident improvements that prevent recurrence
- Own the quality, performance, reliability, and accessibility (WCAG/ADA) of student-facing systems within their domain
Requirements:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field
- 6+ years of experience building and delivering full-stack applications
- Experience developing web applications and APIs using modern languages (e.g., Java, TypeScript/Node.js, JavaScript)
- Experience with frontend frameworks (e.g., Angular or similar)
- Experience working with service-based or modular architectures
- Experience contributing to or leading system design decisions
- Hands-on experience building and operating services on AWS (Fargate/ECS, Lambda, API Gateway, RDS, S3)
- Experience with containerized microservices (Docker, Kubernetes)
- Experience with event-driven architecture or messaging (Kafka or similar)
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience working across multiple programming languages and frameworks in a full-stack environment
- Experience with AWS or other cloud platforms
- Experience with backend frameworks such as Spring Boot or Node.js
- Experience with CI/CD pipelines and modern deployment practices
- Experience with observability and incident response using Dynatrace and CloudWatch
- Experience working in Agile/Scrum environments
- Experience mentoring engineers or acting as a technical lead
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