Staff Software Engineer | Developer Experience

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