Senior Software Engineering

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; 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. 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.
Acts as a technical leader and subject matter expert within assigned domains.
Provides architectural guidance and technical direction to engineering teams.
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.
Evaluates architectural trade-offs related to performance, scalability, reliability, maintainability, security, and cost.
Identifies gaps, risks, and dependencies early and proposes practical solutions.
Cloud-Native Engineering
Designs and develops cloud-native applications and services using AWS and modern cloud technologies.
Leverages event-driven architecture patterns and messaging platforms to support distributed systems.
Contributes to infrastructure automation and cloud governance practices.
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.
Observability & Performance Engineering
Utilizes telemetry, logs, traces, and metrics to improve system performance and reliability.
Uses operational metrics and engineering KPIs to guide decision-making.
Applies secure coding practices throughout the software development lifecycle.
Ensures solutions comply with organizational security, privacy, and regulatory requirements.
Promotes a security-first mindset across engineering teams.
Presents solutions, trade-offs, recommendations, and risks clearly.
Builds strong partnerships across teams and organizational boundaries.
Identifies opportunities to improve engineering productivity, platform reliability, and customer experience.
Leverages AI-assisted engineering tools to improve development efficiency and software quality.
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Software Engineering, or a related field.

• 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.
• Java (Java 17+ preferred)
• Angular, React or Vue frameworks
• SQL and database design
• Automated testing frameworks
• AWS cloud services
• CI/CD pipelines•
• 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 using AI-assisted engineering tools such as GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Copilot, or similar technologies.
A successful Senior Software Engineer:
Drives engineering best practices across teams.
Promotes a culture of reliability, quality, security, and continuous improvement.
Position & Application Details
Full-Time Regular Positions (classified as regular and working 40 standard weekly hours): This is a full-time, regular position (classified for 40 standard weekly hours) that is eligible for bonuses; medical, dental, vision, telehealth and mental healthcare; health savings account and flexible spending account; basic and voluntary life insurance; disability coverage; legal and identity theft coverage; retirement savings plan; and 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, and other paid leaves, including up to 12 weeks of parental leave. How to Apply: If interested, an application will need to be submitted online. Internal WGU employees will need to apply through the internal job board in Workday.
Accommodations: Applicants with disabilities who require assistance or accommodation during the application or interview process should contact our Talent Acquisition team at View email address on us.fitly.work.