Staff Software Engineer | Developer Experience

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 At Western Governors University, we are scaling our engineering organization by investing deeply in internal platforms, developer tooling, and software delivery systems that accelerate how teams build, test, and deploy software. We’re seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the design and evolution of these systems and help define the future of developer experience across the organization. This is a senior technical leadership role focused on backend systems and internal platforms. You will architect and drive the development of core developer infrastructure—including CI/CD systems, internal APIs, service frameworks, automation tooling, and developer-facing platforms that improve productivity and reliability at scale. You will operate across teams and domains, influencing architecture, engineering standards, and platform strategy while remaining hands-on in designing and building critical systems.   What You’ll Do Lead the architecture and development of internal developer platforms, tooling, and backend services Define technical strategy for developer experience (DevEx), including CI/CD, build systems, and deployment automation Design and implement scalable backend services and APIs using Java and Python Establish engineering standards and patterns for internal tooling, service development, and platform integrations Partner with DevOps and platform teams to evolve infrastructure automation and cloud-native delivery systems Drive improvements in observability, monitoring, logging, and system diagnostics across engineering platforms Build and enhance self-service tooling for service provisioning, environments, and deployments Collaborate with engineering leadership to identify systemic bottlenecks in software delivery and resolve them through platform solutions Lead cross-team initiatives that improve engineering velocity, reliability, and operational efficiency Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, providing architectural guidance and technical leadership Influence long-term platform roadmap and contribute to organizational engineering strategy Participate in design reviews, technical governance, and large-scale system planning Required Qualifications 8+ years of professional software engineering experience Deep expertise in backend development with Java and/or Python Proven experience building internal platforms, developer tooling, or large-scale infrastructure systems Strong background in distributed systems, microservices, and API design Experience designing and scaling CI/CD systems and software delivery pipelines Strong understanding of cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) Experience with Docker and Kubernetes in production environments Experience building and operating high-reliability backend services Familiarity with frontend integration using Angular and TypeScript for internal tools Experience with relational and NoSQL databases Strong systems thinking and ability to operate across multiple technical domains Proven ability to influence without authority across engineering organizations Excellent communication skills and technical leadership capabilities Preferred Qualifications Experience in Staff or Principal-level roles in platform engineering or DevEx organizations Experience building developer portals, internal PaaS systems, or self-service infrastructure Strong experience with event-driven architectures and message queues Experience with API gateways, GraphQL, or service mesh technologies Deep knowledge of observability platforms and SRE practices Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or similar) Experience improving large-scale monorepos or multi-team engineering environments Background in release engineering or build system optimization Passion for improving developer productivity at organizational scale What Success Looks Like Engineering teams across the organization ship faster with reduced friction CI/CD and release systems are reliable, scalable, and largely self-service Developer experience improvements measurably increase engineering productivity Internal platforms reduce operational burden and eliminate repetitive engineering work Observability and system insight are standardized across services Strong alignment between platform engineering and product engineering teams Architectural consistency and engineering standards improve across the organization Staff engineer leadership raises the technical bar across multiple teams Why Join Us? Opportunity to define and scale internal developer