Sr. Software Engineer (JAVA) (AWS)

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

Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information technology, or related field


• 5 years’ experience in software development, pioneering new approaches and implementing new technologies


• 5 years software development using JAVA


• Architecting, implementing, and managing microservices with an emphasis on interservice communication and API design


• Agile Scrum environment experience

Preferred Qualifications:

• 1 year of IdentityIQ experience

• oAuth 2 + OIDC


• SAML


• Cloud Environment experience


• Ping Identity (PingFederate PingAccess)


• Sailpoint IdentityIQ


• Okta


• LDAP / Active Directory


• AWS Single Sign-On


• AWS Cognito


• Test Automation: pytest


• 2 associate level certs and 1 professional cert – AWS or Python preferred

• Experience with other software tools and/or languages IE: Java, Tomcat, git, and GitHub; Spring, Spring Boot