Staff Software Engineer | Developer Experience

Western Governors University is committed to expanding access to higher education through innovative online degree programs. They are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the design and development of internal developer platforms and tooling that enhance the software delivery process across the organization.

Responsibilities:

• 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

Requirements:

• 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
• 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