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.

 

Sr. Software Engineer

 

About WGU

Western Governors University is the nation’s largest university with over 129,000 students.  We believe in the transformative power of education and our vision is to be the most innovative, student-centric university. The software that we write is our secret sauce and enables competency-based education at a scale that’s never before been seen.

As EdTech employees, we believe in WGU’s mission and see how the work we do fits into this vision.  The work that we do makes a difference, our ideas and suggestions count, and we feel like part of the team. We live the WGU cultural beliefs:  one-by-one, advance equity, aim true, own it, trust generously, engage respectfully, and achieve together.  We strive to inspire and enable our students, our people, and ourselves to be better. 

 

 

Position Summary

The Sr. Software Engineer is a position of technical expertise, influence, and leadership in the technology realm. The position will be required to apply their expert knowledge to ensure best practices and well-engineered architecture across the department. They will also be a key stakeholder and initiator of major changes to processes, engineering practices, and system administration. This position will be required to work in a space of solving critical issues and initiatives across multiple teams. It will require an extensive and deep understanding of cutting-edge practices and innovative approaches to problems. Sr. Software Engineers are also tasked with establishing and maintaining a positive and productive culture.

 

 

Essential Functions and Responsibilities

• Lead in the building of cutting-edge applications and services to increase and improve the student experience
• Exemplify a mastery of coding excellence and software quality, mentoring others and pioneering new standards and architectural foundations
• Foster and utilize innovative approaches to problems and functionality for all key stakeholders
• Own technologies focusing on student success and scalability while supporting student-focused user experience
• Collaborate with developers, designers, testing, and product management to develop features and innovative approaches to applications and features
• May mentor/advise engineering teams on new languages and technologies; act as a resident expert when needed
• Establish a balance between strategic planning and initiatives with development, communication, troubleshooting, and problem solving
• Lead in the prototyping and development of new technology and framework, improving the student experience
• Identify system redundancies and inefficiencies, proposing innovative and cost-effective solutions
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills and the ability to work equally well in self-managed and team-based Agile projects.
• Work with internal customers to gather business processes and project requirements

 

 

About the Team

The Assessment Integrations team creates software that schedules, launches, and records the results of an assessment. We are looking for the right person to help us realize our team’s mission:   We keep our code clean and tested, use forward looking architecture and technologies, maintain relevant documentation, simplify third party integrations, provide internal tools to meet business needs, and support our students and each other when issues arise. 

 

 

Qualifications

• Bachelors degree in computer science, information technology, or related field; Masters degree a plus
• 6 years experience in software development, pioneering new approaches and implementing new technologies
• Software development using Java, Tomcat, git, and GitHub; Spring, Spring Boot and Python a plus
• Architecting, implementing, and managing microservices with an emphasis on interservice communication and API design
• Database experience with SQL and NoSQL; Oracle, graph and time series databases a plus
• REST API experience with OpenAPI/Swagger, versioning, and API gateways/forwarders; GraphQL knowledge a plus
• Operational and development experience with Amazon Web Services like SNS/SQS/Kinesis, S3, Aurora, EC2, Fargate, API Gateway, CloudWatch, and CloudFormation
• Containerization experience with Docker/Open Container or similar; Fargate and Kubernetes a plus
• Automated testing experience in unit testing (junit), load testing, integration testing, code coverage, and UI-driven testing (Selenium or similar)
• Web UI experience with Angular 9 or similar, Javascript, and jQuery
• Experience integrating with third parties; LTI and Banner experience is a plus

 

As an equal opportunity employer, WGU recognizes that our strength lies in our people. We are committed to diversity.