Staff Software Engineer, AI

If you're passionate about building a better future for individuals, communities, and our country-and you're committed to working hard to play your part in building that future-consider WGU as the next step in your career. Driven by a mission to expand access to higher education through online, competency-based degree programs, WGU is also committed to being a great place to work for a diverse workforce of student-focused professionals. The university has pioneered a new way to learn in the 21st century, one that has received praise from academic, industry, government, and media leaders. Whatever your role, working for WGU gives you a part to play in helping students graduate, creating a better tomorrow for themselves and their families. The salary range for this position takes into account the wide range of factors that are considered in making compensation decisions including but not limited to skill sets; experience and training; licensure and certifications; and other business and organizational needs. At WGU, it is not typical for an individual to be hired at or near the top of the range for their position, and compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case. A reasonable estimate of the current range is: Grade: Technical 411 Pay Range: $161,000.00 - $249,500.00 Job 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. The team is now developing an AI assistant integrated into the portal and grounded in WGU's systems to answer students' questions about their individual degree journeys. 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. This is a hands-on product engineering role for someone who wants to set technical direction while continuing to design, code, test, and operate software. You will help simplify WGU's complex technology landscape from the student's perspective while contributing to an ambitious effort to apply AI meaningfully within higher education. You will join a culture that encourages engineers to operate as inventors, frame undefined problems, and build solutions beyond the boundaries of individual backlog items. What You'll Do * 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... For full info follow application link. Western Governors Univeristy is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, disa bility, veteran status, sexual orientation or any other classification protected by federal, state or local law.