Senior Software Engineer

Senior Software Engineer

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 410Pay Range: $143,700.00 - $222,700.00

Job Description

The Senior Software Engineer is responsible for the research, design, development, analysis, testing, and implementation of software operating or application systems. They communicate project information to client, project manager, or other design personnel working on projects. They maintain good working relationships with clients and staff. They write and maintains complete documentation. They support team members and ensures established goals and deadlines are met. They keep management informed of status and significant problems.

Position Summary

The Senior Software Engineer is responsible for the design, development, testing, deployment, operation, and continuous improvement of enterprise software solutions that support the university's strategic objectives. This role serves as a senior technical contributor and trusted advisor within engineering teams, providing technical leadership, architectural guidance, mentorship, and operational excellence. The Senior Software Engineer partners with Product, Architecture, Security, Infrastructure, and Business stakeholders to deliver scalable, secure, resilient, and maintainable solutions. This individual demonstrates ownership of software throughout its lifecycle, including production support, incident response, reliability engineering, and modernization initiatives.

Key Responsibilities

• Acts as a technical leader and subject matter expert within assigned domains.
• Provides architectural guidance and technical direction to engineering teams.
• Leads design reviews, code reviews, and technical decision-making activities.
• Mentors and coaches engineers through pair programming, knowledge sharing, and technical leadership.
• Promotes engineering excellence through standards, best practices, and continuous improvement initiatives.
• Software Design & Development: Designs, develops, tests, deploys, and maintains enterprise-grade software solutions.
• Translates functional and non-functional requirements into scalable technical designs.
• Evaluates architectural trade-offs related to performance, scalability, reliability, maintainability, security, and cost.
• Identifies gaps, risks, and dependencies early and proposes practical solutions.
• Contributes to long-term technology strategy and modernization efforts.
• Cloud-Native Engineering
• Designs and develops cloud-native applications and services using AWS and modern cloud technologies.
• Implements scalable microservices and API-first architectures.
• Leverages event-driven architecture patterns and messaging platforms to support distributed systems.
• Contributes to infrastructure automation and cloud governance practices.
• Operational Excellence & Reliability
• Owns production health and operational readiness for assigned services and applications.
• Participates in incident response, root cause analysis, problem management, and service restoration activities.
• Partners with Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Infrastructure, and Operations teams to improve system resilience.
• Identifies recurring operational issues and drives permanent corrective actions.
• Establishes monitoring, alerting, and observability practices that proactively identify issues before customer impact occurs.
• DevOps & Continuous Delivery
• Develops and maintains CI/CD pipelines that enable safe, reliable, and repeatable software deployments.
• Automates build, testing, deployment, and operational workflows.
• Contributes to Infrastructure as Code (IaC) initiatives and environment standardization.
• Promotes continuous integration and continuous delivery best practices.
• Observability & Performance Engineering
• Defines and implements Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and operational dashboards.
• Utilizes telemetry, logs, traces, and metrics to improve system performance and reliability.
• Establishes meaningful alerting strategies that reduce noise while improving responsiveness.
• Uses operational metrics and engineering KPIs to guide decision-making.
• Security & Compliance
• Applies secure coding practices throughout the software development lifecycle.
• Participates in threat modeling, security reviews, and vulnerability remediation activities.
• Ensures solutions comply with organizational security, privacy, and regulatory requirements.
• Promotes a security-first mindset across engineering teams.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration
• Collaborates effectively with Product Managers, Architects, QA Engineers, Security Engineers, Infrastructure teams, and business stakeholders.
• Communicates technical concepts effectively to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Presents solutions, trade-offs, recommendations, and risks clearly.
• Builds strong partnerships across teams and organizational boundaries.
• Innovation & Continuous Improvement
• Identifies opportunities to improve engineering productivity, platform reliability, and customer experience.
• Evaluates emerging technologies and industry trends for potential adoption.
• Drives continuous improvement initiatives through automation, simplification, and modernization.
• Leverages AI-assisted engineering tools to improve development efficiency and software quality.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Software Engineering, or a related field.
• Equivalent professional experience may be substituted for educational requirements at the discretion of the hiring manager
• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Experience designing, developing, testing, and supporting enterprise applications.
• Experience with modern software development practices and Agile methodologies.
• Experience building and consuming RESTful APIs and web services.
• Experience working with relational and NoSQL databases.
• Experience integrating enterprise applications and third-party platforms.
• Experience supporting production systems and participating in incident response activities.
• Experience mentoring engineers and providing technical leadership.
• Technical Skills
• Strong experience with:
• Java (Java 17+ preferred)
• Angular, React or Vue frameworks
• Spring Boot
• REST APIs
• SQL and database design
• Object-oriented design principles
• Distributed systems
• Microservices architecture
• Git and source control management
• Automated testing frameworks
• Experience with:
• AWS cloud services
• Containerization and orchestration technologies
• Event-driven architectures
• Messaging technologies such as Kafka, SNS/SQS, EventBridge, RabbitMQ, or equivalent
• CI/CD pipelines•
• Infrastructure as Code

Preferred Qualifications

• Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field.
• Experience with AWS cloud-native development and modernization initiatives.
• Experience migrating legacy applications to cloud-native architectures.
• Experience with Salesforce integrations and enterprise SaaS platforms.
• Experience with Dynatrace, Datadog, Splunk, CloudWatch, OpenTelemetry, or similar observability platforms.
• Experience with GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Azure DevOps, Terraform, or CloudFormation.
• Experience with higher education technology platforms.
• Experience establishing SLOs, operational dashboards, and reliability practices.
• Experience using AI-assisted engineering tools such as GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Copilot, or similar technologies.

Leadership Expectations

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